Predicting How Long a Woman Will Live

Ladies, if we could tell you how long you will live, would you want to know? It may no longer be just an academic question or “what if” scenario. A study done by the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) has identified a possible “life line” predictor for women that promises to be more than just a little bit more accurate than a Gypsy's palm reading.

The longevity predictor is the length of your telomeres. These are the sequences of nucleotides at the end of each chromosome whose primary purpose was believed to be protecting the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes – sort of like the plastic tips on your chromosomal shoelaces.

Previous studies had indicated that women who had given birth later in life had longer telomeres in common. The new study connects longer telomere length to longer life.

The dataset used by the study came from The Long Life Family Study, (LLFS) an international collaborative study, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, which was started in 2004. LLFS collected data from families in the U.S. and Denmark in an effort to learn why some people live until a very old age and why some families maintain their health far longer than the average family.

In this study, the proportion of women in the longest telomere statistical group was higher for women in the fourth quartile of maternal age at the birth of their last child than in the first quartile. Compared with women who had their last child at age 29, women with a later age at birth of their last child were found to have increased odds of being in the longest statistical group of telomere length.

"With longevity and the ability to bear children at an older age associated with longer telomere length, this study suggests that a higher maternal age of successful child bearing may be a marker of healthy aging," says Dr. JoAnn Pinkerton, NAMS executive director. "However, it's important to remember that personal and social factors often influence childbearing age, and these factors may not have any relation to either a woman's ability to bear children at later ages, longevity, or telomere length."

The study was published in the journal Menopause.