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NIH-Funded Study Seeks Long-Lived Families to Help Discover Secrets of Long, Healthy Life

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Brief Description:
Have you ever noticed how some families tend to have a large representation of healthy, elderly relatives?

Transcript:
Schmalfeldt: Have you ever noticed how some families tend to have a large representation of healthy, elderly relatives? Is there some kind of secret, some different thing these folks are doing that affords them such long, healthy life spans? That's what they'd like to find out the Long Life Family Study — a project supported by the National Institute on Aging. The study is recruiting families to participate in the study, according to Winni Rossi, deputy director of the NIA's Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology Program.

Rossi: Well, we know that long, healthy life tends to run in some families. And the researchers from the Long Life Family Study want to know what are the secrets that contribute to these long and healthy lives. So we're trying to identify factors that contribute protection against disease and disability that allow some people to live so long and so well.

Schmalfeldt: Ms. Rossi explained how this study differs from many of the other studies undertaken and supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Rossi: Many studies that take place at NIH look at risk factors for disease and disability. We're looking in this study at ways to better understand factors that protect against disease and disability and promote healthy longevity.

Schmalfeldt: Researchers are seeking a large number of families with several long-lived members — especially families with at least two living members aged 80 or older who reside near Pittsburgh, Boston or New York, as well as their living children. Participants will be asked to provide a small blood sample to obtain genetic information to help determine the role that genes might play in long, healthy survival, in addition to many other factors. For more info, check out www.nia.nih.gov. From the National Institutes of Health, I'm Bill Schmalfeldt in Bethesda, Maryland.

This page was last reviewed on May 26, 2006 .

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