Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

by Peter Attia

Studies of Scandinavian twins have found that genes may be responsible for only about 20 to 30 percent of the overall variation in human lifespan. The catch is that the older you get, the more genes start to matter. For centenarians, they seem to matter a lot. Being the sister of a centenarian makes you eight times more likely to reach that age yourself, while brothers of centenarians are seventeen times as likely to celebrate their hundredth birthday, according to data from the one-thousand-subject New England Centenarian Study, which has been tracking extremely long-lived individuals since 1995 (although because these subjects grew up in the same families, with presumably similar lifestyles and habits, this finding could be due to some environmental factors as well). If you don’t happen to have centenarian siblings, the next best option is to choose long-lived parents. This is part of why I place so much importance on taking a detailed family history from my patients: I need to know when your relatives died and why. What are your likely “icebergs,” genetically