What Fountain of Youth?
Thomas Perls MD, MPH
(Letter to the Editor, NY Times, March 18, 1998)
To the Editor:
Re your March 14 front-page article on the scores of very old people living in Lerik, Azerbaijan: Such a fountain of youth would be of incredible scientific significance. However, don’t you wonder why geneticists and gerontologists aren’t intensively studying this population?
The fact is, in the early 1980’s American scientists did go to Azerbaijan with high hopes and visions of discovering factors that slow down aging. Instead, after careful investigation of the reported ages, they found them to be off by a generation.
The centenarians were either using birth or church certificates of aunts or uncles with the same names as their own or there just wasn’t any reasonable proof at all.
Cases of extreme longevity require detailed scrutiny because they would be so incredibly rare. That is not to say that the elders of Azerbaijan are not worth studying. The potentially high prevalence of people reaching at least their 80s or even 90s in relatively good health despite third world conditions is noteworthy.
THOMAS PERLS, M.D.
Cambridge, Mass., March 15, 1998
The writer is the Director of the New England Centenarian Study at Harvard Medical School.
