Long Live the Queen

Queen Elizabeth will soon be the longest-lived British monarch ever.

She overtakes the record set by her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria.

Victoria, who was born on May 24, 1819, died on January 22, 1901, having lived for 81 years, seven months and 29 days or 81 years and 243 days.

According to Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II, who was born on April 21 1926, beats her ancestor's record at around 5pm on December 20. [Link]

Here's a list of British monarchs since 1603 ranked by longevity. The key to Elizabeth's longevity? She's never eaten a surfeit of lampreys.

Farm Livin' Is the Life for Me

I've blogged before about the longevity studies of Drs. Leonid and Natalia Gavrilova. Their latest conclusions were drawn from World War I Draft Registration Cards.

In their study, Gavrilov and Gavrilova first used Social Security data to locate 240 men born in 1887 who lived to be at least 100.

In 171 of those cases, the men's physical and social attributes at age 30 were recorded on their WW I draft cards -- giving the researchers a snapshot of their lives at the time.

The Chicago team then compared that data against draft card information for a randomly selected group of American men who were also born in 1887 but who did not reach 100. [Link]

They concluded that trim farmers with more than three children were more likely to live to see 100 than overweight city boys without kids. In fact, living on a farm "more than doubled a man's odds of living into the triple digits."

Tamale Suspected in Woman's Death

A 128-year-old woman was buried Friday in El Salvador.

Cruz Hernandez, who national birth records show was born on May 3, 1878, in central El Salvador, passed away in her sleep on Thursday, neighbour and close family friend Margarita Ascencio said by telephone. Hernandez died without being recognized by the Guinness Book of Records.

"She had been poorly for a few days, and yesterday, after eating a tamale and drinking some milk, she went to sleep and never woke up," Ascencio said.

Many who knew her attributed her longevity to her favourite drink of a beer with two raw eggs in it. [Link]

Her diet was strangely similar to that of this woman. I need to eat more eggs and drink more booze.

Eggstreme Longevity

Florrie Baldwin is the oldest woman in Britain. According to her six-year-old great-great grandson Harry, "She really, really is 110. None of my friends have a grandma as old as mine."

Apart from the odd niggle she is still fit and healthy for her age and attributes her long life to eating an egg sandwich for breakfast and a cooked meal for dinner.

She said: "I always eat an egg sandwich in the morning and have at least one hot meal each day. I think I've had an egg sandwich almost every day since I was married at 23. I also do like a glass of sherry now and again."

If she had eaten a fried egg sandwich every day since she was 23, it would mean she had polished off 31,755 in her lifetime. [Link]

The Newest Oldest People

Just days after the death of the world's oldest woman, the world's oldest man has died. Emiliano Mercado del Toro of Puerto Rico was 115, and was a lifelong bachelor who claimed to have had three girlfriends (presumably not, like Hugh Hefner, all at the same time). He credited his longevity to eating boiled corn, cod and milk, a diet which apparently failed him in the end.

This makes Tomoji Tanabe of Japan the world's oldest man, and Emma Faust Tillman of Connecticut the world's oldest person. Emma (according to Wikipedia) was the child of former slaves, and once worked as a servant for Katharine Hepburn's family. She was one of 23 children, five of whom lived past 100. Imagine if they'd eaten cod every day.

That's One Big Roof

As you dodge elbows and fight over drumsticks at the dinner table this Thursday, give thanks that you're not a member of this family from Punjab.

At 118, Sardar Budh Singh maybe the world's oldest man, and his wife, 112-year-old Sawan Kaur could be the world's oldest woman, and they say the secret of their longevity is 'simple living' and 'family unity'. A Namdhari Sikh family located in the Samra village of Amritsar District, it consists of 99 members, or four generations, all living under one roof. [Link]

No Longevity in My Genes

I have a grandmother who's 93, a great-grandmother who lived to 96, and a 5th-great-grandmother who was going strong at 103. Nevertheless, I could kick off at any moment.

Dr. James W. Vaupel has determined that genes have more to do with how tall you are than how long you'll live.

“How tall your parents are compared to the average height explains 80 to 90 percent of how tall you are compared to the average person,” Dr. Vaupel said. But “only 3 percent of how long you live compared to the average person can be explained by how long your parents lived.”

“You really learn very little about your own life span from your parents’ life spans,” Dr. Vaupel said. “That’s what the evidence shows. Even twins, identical twins, die at different times.” On average, he said, more than 10 years apart. [Link]

Dr. Vaupel obviously didn't include Chang and Eng Bunker in his study.

Are First-Born Scorpio Cowgirls Immortal?

Leonid A. Gavrilov and Natalia S. Gavrilova of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center have been studying the longevity of American centenarians. To identify the 100-year-olds, they've been using the Internet.

[W]e extracted detailed family data for 991 alleged centenarians born in 1875-1899 in the United States from publicly available computerized genealogies of 75 million individuals identified in our previous study. . . . In order to validate the age of the centenarians, we linked these records to the Social Security Administration Death Master File records (for death date validation) and then to the records of the U.S. censuses for years 1900, 1910 and 1920 (for birth date validation). [Link (pdf)]

The researchers found that three unexpected factors may contribute to an extra-long life:

• Women and men who were the first born in large families were two to three times more likely to make it to 100 than later-born children.
• Those raised in the rural West had a better chance of reaching that age.
• People who were born in October and November had longer life expectancy than those born in April through June. [Link]

If you satisfy none of these criteria, you may want to start making final arrangements now.