The Longevity Inheritance: What the Children of 100-Year-Olds Are Teaching Us

Picture two 70-year-olds side by side. They’re the same age, they eat much the same food, and they get about the same exercise. One of them has a mother who blew out 100 candles on her last birthday cake. A large new study suggests that this one fact tells you a good deal about which of the two is more likely to still be healthy and active ten years from now.

Most of us assume a long life comes from good habits, and habits matter a great deal. Scientists have long suspected there is more to it, though. Some people reach 100 without ever getting the heart disease, high blood pressure, or strokes that cut most lives short. Is that resilience built into their biology? And can they hand it down to their children?

A Study 29 Years In The Making

A new study in JAMA Network Open takes a real step toward answering that question.¹ Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Boston University, and Tufts Medical Center followed more than 5,000 people for up to 29 years. They compared 2,319 adults who had at least one parent live to 100 or older with 2,703 people whose parents had ordinary lifespans.

What makes this study useful is that it doesn’t rely on a single group. It pulled from three very different populations: Ashkenazi Jewish families in the Bronx enrolled in Einstein’s LonGenity study, participants in the New England Centenarian Study, and volunteers in the UK Biobank. The Biobank’s health outcomes come straight from national medical records rather than from memory or self-report.²

Here are the numbers:

• At any given age, the children of centenarians were 42% less likely to die.
• They were 33% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease.
• They were 32% less likely to develop high blood pressure.
• When these problems did appear, they came later: about 3 years later for death and about 5 years later for hypertension.

Here is the part that got the researchers’ attention. The team adjusted for smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol, education, and income, and the numbers barely moved. Whatever protects these families seems to run deeper than lifestyle.

Why Study The Kids And Not The Centenarians Themselves?

Centenarians are wonderful people to meet and difficult people to study. By the time someone turns 100, nearly everyone born the same year has died, so there is nobody left to compare them with. Blood tests at that age are hard to interpret, too. As senior author Dr. Sofiya Milman put it, you often can’t tell whether a finding “is protective or is just a marker of very, very old age.”²

Their children solve both problems. They share half their genes with the long-lived parent, they have living peers to compare against, and they can be followed forward in time to see whether disease arrives, and when.

Earlier research had pointed the same way. A 2004 analysis from the New England Centenarian Study found that centenarians’ children had 62% lower overall mortality and 85% lower coronary heart disease mortality.³ In 2017, the LonGenity team reported less cardiovascular disease in the children of people who lived past 95, even though their smoking, drinking, exercise, and diet were no different from anyone else’s.⁴ The new study finds the same signals across three populations over nearly three decades.

The true effect may be bigger than it looks. Each child inherits only half of a parent’s genes, so roughly half of the offspring may have missed the protective variants altogether. “Your signal gets diluted,” explains longevity geneticist Dr. Joris Deelen of Leiden University Medical Center.² Among the children who did inherit those genes, the protection could be considerably stronger.

The Cancer Surprise

One result went the other way. Cancer rates in the centenarians’ children were about the same as in everyone else. “I’ll be very frank; we didn’t expect that,” Milman admitted.²

She offers two possible explanations. The first is over-screening. Healthy, active 75-year-olds get screened for everything, and screening turns up slow-growing prostate and thyroid cancers that would never have caused harm. These people “would have died with that cancer, as opposed to from that cancer.” The second is that they get cancer at the usual rate but survive it better. The 2004 study did find 71% lower cancer mortality in centenarians’ offspring,³ while the new study measured only how often cancer was diagnosed.

The Blood Vessel Connection

Dr. Jalees Rehman of the University of Illinois, a cardiologist who now studies vascular biology and aging, read the data differently. To him, the results “screamed strong endothelial health that’s maybe passed on across generations.”²

The endothelium is the thin layer of cells lining every blood vessel in your body. When it is healthy, it releases nitric oxide so vessels can relax and widen, it resists the buildup of plaque, and it acts as a gatekeeper that decides which immune cells get into your tissues. When it fails, heart disease, hypertension, and stroke tend to follow. Cancer depends less directly on the health of your blood vessels, so one inherited trait, a robust endothelium, would account for protection against three of the outcomes but not the fourth.

Rehman’s own research focuses on inflammation, which works like a web of signals that reinforce each other rather than a single switch. His guess is that centenarian families carry tiny genetic variations that keep inflammation in a “Goldilocks” zone: strong enough to fight off infection, and quick enough to calm down once the job is done.²

Can We Bottle It?

Milman’s team has spent years studying growth hormone and IGF-1, a growth factor that is essential when we’re young but may work against us after about age 50. They have found IGF-1 receptor mutations enriched in centenarians,⁵ and they have shown that lower IGF-1 levels predict survival in people with exceptional longevity.⁶ They are now developing a drug that blocks the growth hormone receptor, hoping that “the rest of us who don’t have exceptional longevity in our families” might borrow some of that protection.²

Not everyone thinks one pill will be enough. Deelen, whose large genetic studies have mapped longevity-associated variants,⁷ suspects we will need combinations of drugs. Rehman points out that we already have a therapy that works on whole networks at once: exercise. It “activates whole networks of resilience, networks of anti-senescence, networks of vascular health.”²

The Bottom Line

If your parents didn’t make it to 100, there is no reason to despair. Milman says a healthy lifestyle “absolutely will benefit 99.9% of us who don’t have longevity in our families.”² Genes give some lucky people a head start, but the rest of us can still look after our blood vessels, keep inflammation in check, and stay active. One detail stuck with me. After 16 years of studying centenarians’ children, what Milman notices most is how busy they are. Many are still working, and many volunteer. “They can’t even come in for visits.”²

References

1. Reed et al. Morbidity and mortality in offspring of centenarians across three cohorts. JAMA Netw Open. 2026. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.30964
2. Brzostowicki D. What we learn studying the children of centenarians. October 19, 2026 (source article, including interviews with S. Milman, J. Deelen, and J. Rehman).
3. Terry DF, et al. Lower all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality in centenarians’ offspring. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2004;52(12):2074–2076.
4. Gubbi S, et al. Effect of exceptional parental longevity and lifestyle factors on prevalence of cardiovascular disease in offspring. Am J Cardiol. 2017;120(12):2170–2175.
5. Suh Y, et al. Functionally significant insulin-like growth factor I receptor mutations in centenarians. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2008;105(9):3438–3442.
6. Milman S, et al. Low insulin-like growth factor-1 level predicts survival in humans with exceptional longevity. Aging Cell. 2014;13(4):769–771.
7. Deelen J, et al. A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies multiple longevity genes. Nat Commun. 2019;10:3669.