Children of centenarian parents enjoy lower risks of heart disease and high blood pressure, adding to evidence that healthy ageing runs deep in family genetics.
A study published in JAMA Network Open found that adults with at least one parent who lived to 100 had substantially lower risks of death, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure compared with people whose parents had shorter lifespans. Several of these protective effects also emerged years later in life, suggesting that exceptional longevity may reflect an extended period of healthier ageing rather than survival alone.
Led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Boston University, and Tufts Medical Center, the study adds to growing evidence that unusually long and healthy lives cluster within families. Lifestyle factors remained important, but they did not fully explain the advantages observed among centenarians’ children.
“Centenarians offer crucial insights into what it looks like to age well,” said Dr Sofiya Milman, Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Einstein and senior author of the study. “We wanted to know whether they pass their good health and longevity down to their children, and whether those advantages come from healthy habits or something more fundamental, like genetics.”
Lower Risk, Later Onset
At any given age, people with a centenarian parent had a 42% lower risk of death, a 33%lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and a 32% lower risk of high blood pressure than participants whose parents had shorter lifespans.
Timing mattered too: offspring of centenarians died approximately three years later on average and developed high blood pressure roughly five years later, delaying a condition that contributes to heart, kidney, and brain disease. These benefits held even after accounting for smoking, alcohol, exercise, diet, education, and socioeconomic status, suggesting behaviour and circumstance do not fully explain the pattern.
Protection was not universal, however. Stroke risk was reduced only in two of the three cohorts, and cancer risk was no lower among centenarians’ offspring, consistent with earlier research.
Why This Matters for Singapore
These findings carry particular weight in Singapore, on track to become a “super-aged” society, with life expectancy at birth reaching a preliminary 83.9 years in 2025, among the highest in Asia. Singapore is also home to a notably high concentration of nonagenarians and centenarians, and local ageing research has long observed similar clustering of healthy longevity within families.
With cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure remaining leading causes of local morbidity, understanding the familial roots of healthy ageing is increasingly relevant to Singapore’s healthcare planning, and lends scientific weight to the Ministerial Committee on Ageing‘s push to extend healthspan, not just lifespan. For clinicians, family history of exceptional longevity may prove a meaningful, if underused, factor in assessing baseline cardiovascular risk, alongside diet, activity, and ethnicity-specific profiles already embedded in local guidelines.
From Family Trait to Future Treatment
“This study was not designed to identify the specific inherited traits that benefit centenarians’ children,” Dr Milman said. “But studying these families offers a unique window into the biology of healthy ageing, and a strong rationale for uncovering the factors that protect them from age-related disease. These are factors that could ultimately inform treatments for people who did not inherit exceptional longevity.”
Co-author Dr Paola Sebastiani, of Tufts Medical Center, said the study brings researchers “closer to understanding the biological factors that may help protect against age-related disease and promote longer, healthier lives.”
Lead author Dr Eric Reed, of Einstein, noted that the consistency across three very different cohorts was especially striking: “This is not to say that lifestyle does not count. But some people from families with exceptional longevity appear to enjoy biological advantages that help them remain healthy despite the environmental and behavioural factors that affect us all.”
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References
- Reed, E. R., Wysocki, M., Gal, M., Aleksic, S., Gao, T., Barzilai, N., Ye, K., Bortnick, A. E., Andersen, S. L., Perls, T., Sebastiani, P., & Milman, S. (2026). Exceptional parental longevity and onset of morbidity and mortality across cohorts. JAMA Network Open, 9(8), e2630964. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.30964
- The Global Statistics. (2026, June 19). Singapore population statistics 2026: Demographics & key facts. https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/singapore-population-statistics/
- Duke-NUS Medical School, Centre for Ageing Research and Education. (2024, October 5). How Singapore is preparing for a super aged society come 2026. https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/care/news-events/news/articles/how-singapore-is-preparing-for-a-super-aged-society-come-2026
