Early-Life and Late-Life Predictors of Exceptional Longevity in the United States - Project Description This application aims to advance our understanding of why some people manage to survive to extreme old age (100+ years) and biological and social correlates of exceptional longevity. The project will take advantage of the ongoing revolution in information technology to analyze the determinants of exceptional survival at both individual and population levels. It will integrate a wide range of U.S. data sources now accessible through the Internet, including Social Security Administration records, Census data, validated genealogies, family reconstitutions, and military draft records. For the first time, newly available 1940 and 1950 Census data will be utilized to examine the multivariate effects of midlife and late-life factors—such as education, occupation, income, and their interactions—on exceptional longevity. This study will explore the influence of early-life, midlife, and late-life conditions, adult physical characteristics, marriage, and reproductive history on longevity, testing various biomedical and social hypotheses. Designed as an interdisciplinary investigation, this project seeks funding to further expand and enhance the Database on Exceptional Longevity developed during the initial research phase supported by NIH. The project will substantially expand the existing family-linked database, which currently comprises 3,408 identified and validated centenarians along with 4,000 shorter-lived peers born between 1890 and 1897. In the initial phase of data collection, individuals born between 1890 and 1892 were successfully linked to the 1900 and 1930 U.S. Censuses. This next phase will build upon and enhance the dataset by incorporating additional records from the 1910, 1920, 1940, and 1950 U.S. Censuses, as well as WWI and WWII draft registration cards. The resulting unique database will provide a comprehensive view of centenarians' living conditions throughout their life course, physical characteristics at various ages, and familial longevity, including data on parents, grandparents, siblings, and other relatives. To further support future longevity research globally, this project will continue developing a robust database that integrates key longevity predictors. This resource will be made publicly available to the research community, enhancing the infrastructure for subsequent studies on human longevity.
