Centenarians – doubtful and doubtful
From the editorial office:
On January 11, 2010, at the 112th year of life, one of the oldest women in Italy, Theresia Staffler, died in the mountainous town of Santa Valpurga (Santa Valpurga) in the north Italian region of Trentino Alto Adige. Staffler, who was born in 1898, managed to live in the XIX, XX and XXI centuries. She was ranked 45th in the world list of centenarians. Theresia will be buried by her two daughters, who are 88 and 85 years old, as well as numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
On this occasion, RIA Novosti based on its own information and open sources (but is this information and these sources always trustworthy?) prepared the article. What is true here, and what is legends, tales and pure fiction, decide for yourself.
The most famous centenarians in the worldThe duration of human life depends on many reasons.
This is a genetic predisposition, and the environment, and the mood of a person, his desire to live. Only a small fraction of a percent of the total number of people on Earth lives to be a hundred years old.
According to gerontologists, the life expectancy of a modern person is 40% less than that allotted to him by nature: 100-120 years of active and full-fledged life is not the limit for the human body.
According to the classification of the World Health Organization, elderly people who have crossed the 90-year mark are considered to be centenarians.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the limit of human life expectancy is 122 years. Jeanne Louise Calma, a resident of France, who was born on February 21, 1875 in Arles, lived so long. A resident of Japan, Shigechio Izumi, who was born in 1865 and died of pneumonia in 1986, lived two years less.
But many scientists and journalists believe that the Guinness Book of Records does not have all the data on centenarians. So, a reporter of the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar tells about a man who, according to him, is 195 years old and he remembers the opening of the Suez Canal perfectly.
The population census in Vietnam in 1991 also made adjustments to the question of centenarians. A man who turned 142 years old was found in Kunhol County, Ngetin Province. There, in Vietnam, they found a long-lived woman who was born in 1847, survived her three husbands and has four children who are already over 100 years old.
According to unverified data, one of the oldest inhabitants of the planet was a Chinese citizen Li-Chgung-yang, who was born in 1680 and died in 1933 at the age of 253 years. However, these reports are not documented.
One of the oldest residents of Colombia, Javier Pereira, lived 169 years. A special postage stamp was issued in his honor. On the day when Pereira turned 146 years old, representatives of the authorities and senior officials came to congratulate him. They asked for the consent of the hero of the day to have a commemorative stamp with his image issued in his honor. Pereira agreed, but set a condition: at the bottom in the corner of the stamp should be written: "I drink and smoke."
In the Soviet Union, a postage stamp was also issued in honor of the long-lived Mukhamed Eyvazov (he was 148 years old at the time). After that, Eyvazov lived for another three years. He died in August 1959.
An interesting case is described by English historians. In 1635, Thomas Parr, a peasant from the provinces, came to London to appear before King Charles as a miracle of longevity. Parr claimed that he had outlived nine kings and was 152 years old. In honor of the centenarian, the king arranged a magnificent feast, after which Thomas Parr suddenly died. It was opened by the famous English doctor William Harvey, who discovered blood circulation. According to Harvey, Parr died of pneumonia, but, as legends say, the cause of his death was a plentiful meal at the king's table. Parr was buried with honors in Westminster Abbey.
Of the most famous centenarians , the following can also be noted:
Zoltan Petrij (Hungary) is 186 years old.
Peter Zortai (Hungary) – 185 years old (1539-1724).
Cantigern is the founder of the Abbey in Glasgow. Known by the name of Saint Mungo. Lived 185 years.
Tensa Abziva (Ossetia) is 180 years old.
Huddiye (Albania) is 170 years old. His offspring reached 200 people.
Hanjer Nina (Turkey). Lived 169 years. He died in 1964.
Sayyad Abdul Mabud (Pakistan) is 159 years old.
In the developed countries of the world, there is a constant struggle for survival and recovery of the nation, for increasing the life expectancy of each person. An increase in life expectancy in all countries of the world is achieved by reducing child mortality and reducing mortality from cancer and heart diseases. Thus, by defeating diseases, humanity strives to get closer to reaching the upper limit of human life.
Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at the University of California, based on his graphs of human survival for individual countries and different periods, obtained a theoretical curve with an upper limit of 115 years. At the same time, Hayflick discovered another interesting pattern: it turns out that a person's life expectancy is proportionally related to the ratio of brain weight to body weight. The greater this ratio, the longer life, and it changed quite dramatically at certain periods during evolution. The last time its strong increase occurred 100 thousand years ago, after which it practically did not change, as did the ratio of brain weight to body weight.
Leonard Hayflick also expressed an original point of view on the aging of the body. According to him, aging occurs after the cessation of growth, and those creatures whose growth does not stop with time (shark, sturgeon, Galapagos turtle) age very, very slowly.
Various scientists of the world speak differently about the upper limit of human life. The famous medieval physician Paracelsus believed that a person can live 600 years. Albrecht von Haller and Christoph Wilhelm Gufeland (scientists of the XVIII century) considered the age of 200 years to be the limit of human life. Russian scientists Ilya Mechnikov and Alexander Bogomolets talked about 160 years.
Paradoxical as it may sound, few centenarians die a natural death directly from old age. Almost always the cause of death is various diseases – cardiovascular, oncological, infectious.
In his "Studies of Optimism," Mechnikov pointed out that "in 1902, in Paris, only 85 people died of old age for 1,000 deaths between the ages of 70 and 74. Most of the old people died from contagious diseases: pneumonia and consumption, heart disease, kidney disease or brain hemorrhage." Even the famous long-lived Englishman Thomas Parr (152 years old) and the Turk Zara Agha (156 years old) died not from age, but from diseases (the first from pneumonia, the second from uremic coma caused by prostate disease).
Among centenarian centenarians, drunkards are often found. The surgeon Politiman died at the age of 140 (1685-1825); from the age of 25 he used to get drunk every day after finishing his studies. Gascony, a butcher in Trieux (Pyrenees), who died in 1767 at the age of 120, got drunk twice a week. The example of one Irish landowner Brown, who lived to 120 years, is striking. He bequeathed to make him a tombstone inscription stating that "he was always drunk and so terrible in this state that death itself was afraid of him."
But some centenarians loved wine, others coffee. For example, the famous Voltaire was very fond of coffee, and when one doctor began to tell him that coffee is poison, Voltaire replied: "It's almost 80 years since I've been poisoned by this poison." Coffee lover Elizabeth Durian lived 114 years.
They say that smoking shortens life. However, many centenarians smoked. Ross, who received the Longevity Award at 102 (1896), was an avid smoker.
Scientists have always been interested in the so-called "centers of longevity", isolated areas where people live much longer than in other places and retain vitality and energy until the end of their lives. One of these areas is Abkhazia, where almost 3% of the population is long-lived, whose age exceeds 100 years.
It is estimated that in 2000 there were 70-80 thousand people in the USA aged 100 years or more. Centenarians represent one of the fastest growing age groups in the U.S. population.
The average life expectancy in Cuba, the neighbors of the United States, is one of the highest in the world: 76 years. At the same time, for 11 million of the country's population, there are about 3 thousand people who have crossed the centennial milestone.
Taiwan boasts the number of its centenarians over the age of 100. According to the Xinhua news Agency, as of October 2009, there are 1,223 people in the state. There are 853 women and 370 men among the elderly. The oldest of them are a 116–year-old resident of Kaohsiung City and a 113-year-old resident of Lianhua County, Taipei City.
In November 2009, peasant Halima Solmaz, the oldest woman on the planet, who lives in eastern Turkey in the mountainous province of Diyarbakir, turned 125. In confirmation of this, the representative of the provincial census bureau showed the identity card of the universal hero of the day, in which the date of birth of Halime's grandmother was registered – 1884.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.01.2010