In late summer 2024, Maria Branyas, a Spanish woman who had reached 117 and held the record as the world's oldest verified living person, died, leaving behind a body that scientists had already studied with unusual care. Now, in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, their findings invite a quiet reconsideration of an old assumption: that a long life must be a life worn down by illness. Her case suggests that aging and disease, though they often travel together, can sometimes walk separate paths. One woman cannot settle the question, but she offers a window onto how the very long-lived might escap
Study of World's Oldest Person Links Rare Genes and Gut Bacteria to Extreme Longevity
Aging and disease can, under certain conditions, become decoupled.
Mark
Why does a study of one woman get this much attention?
Mimi
Because she reached 117 and still lacked major age-related disease. That makes her a rare test of whether getting old and getting sick have to go together.
Mark
What did the researchers actually find in her?
Mimi
Rare protective gene variants, low inflammation in her blood, and gut bacteria like a much younger person's, including Bifidobacterium.
Luke
Careful, though. These are findings from one person. We can't say which of these factors caused her long life and which just came along with it.
Mark
She also showed signs of aging, right?
Mimi
Yes. Shortened telomeres and an aged population of B lymphocytes. She wasn't untouched by time.
Luke
Which makes the biological age result interesting. Decades younger by the DNA tags is a striking claim, but it's one measurement in one woman.
Mark
So what can the rest of us take from it?
Mimi
The authors say it could inform gene-targeted therapies and lifestyle or diet changes.
Luke
Could, not will. The source offers no evidence yet that any of that works, and it doesn't say how much of her longevity was genes versus lifestyle.
Le Pouls
- A single extraordinary body, examined at many levels at once, has begun to unsettle the belief that extreme old age must come with disease.
- Her telomeres were shortened and her immune cells showed age, yet no major age-related illness took hold.
- Rare protective gene variants and unusually low inflammation in her blood point to a body that was not fighting a constant, quiet fire.
- Her gut bacteria looked decades younger, and her DNA-based biological age ran well behind her calendar years.
- Because the study rests on one person, researchers are cautious, and the next test is whether other supercentenarians show the same pattern.
In late summer 2024, Maria Branyas, a Spanish woman who had reached 117 and held the record as the world's oldest verified living person, died, leaving behind a body that scientists had already studied with unusual care. Now, in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, their findings invite a quiet reconsideration of an old assumption: that a long life must be a life worn down by illness. Her case suggests that aging and disease, though they often travel together, can sometimes walk separate paths. One woman cannot settle the question, but she offers a window onto how the very long-lived might escape the fate most of us expect.
Maria Branyas died in August 2024 at the age of 117, still holding the title of the world's oldest verified living person. Before she passed, scientists had studied her body in remarkable detail, and their results have now been published in Cell Reports Medicine.
The team used multiomics analysis, examining many biological systems together: her DNA and active genes, her blood, saliva, stool, and gut bacteria. They set her results beside those of younger people and other supercentenarians, the rare few who live to 110 or beyond.
What they found challenges a common assumption. Extreme age, the authors suggest, does not have to mean poor health. Branyas did age in measurable ways, with shortened telomeres and an older population of B lymphocytes. Yet she had no major age-related diseases. Rare genetic variants appeared to shield her from heart disease and cancer, and her blood showed low inflammation, the kind of simmering strain that often drives decline.
Her gut seemed to belong to a much younger person, rich in Bifidobacterium, a beneficial microbe that usually fades with age. Her biological age, read from chemical tags on her DNA, sat decades below her years.
The researchers are careful: one person is not a pattern. Still, they hope these clues could guide gene-targeted therapies and dietary or lifestyle changes. The real test now is whether other supercentenarians carry the same quiet signatures.
Maria Branyas was 117 when she died in August 2024, and until then she held the title of the world's oldest verified living person. Before her death, scientists had examined her body in unusual detail, and the results have now appeared in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.
The team used a method called multiomics analysis, which looks at many biological systems at once. For Branyas, that meant her DNA and her active genes, along with her blood, saliva, stool and gut bacteria. The researchers then compared her results with those of younger people and of other supercentenarians, the rare group who reach 110 or older.
The central finding is that extreme old age does not necessarily mean poor health. The authors wrote that aging and disease can, under certain conditions, become decoupled, which challenges the common perception that the two are inextricably linked.
Branyas was not free of aging. She had shortened telomeres, the caps at the ends of chromosomes, and an aged population of B lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell. But she had no major age-related diseases. The researchers found rare genetic variants in her that protected against common illnesses of old age, including heart disease and cancer. The inflammatory markers in her blood were also low. That suggests her body was not constantly managing low-grade inflammation, a known driver of age-related disease.
Her gut told a similar story. The bacteria there resembled those of a much younger person. One sign was the presence of Bifidobacterium, a beneficial bacterium that is essential for gut health but typically declines as people get older.
The most surprising result came from measuring her biological age by reading the tiny chemical tags on her DNA. By that measure she was decades younger than her chronological age, which suggests her body was not aging as fast as it should have been.
The study covers a single person, so it is probably too great a leap to generalize from it. Still, the authors suggest that insights like these could help in developing therapies that target specific genes and metabolic pathways, as well as lifestyle and dietary changes to ease age-related decline. What to watch for is whether the same patterns appear in other supercentenarians.
Citations marquantes
Aging and disease can, under certain conditions, become decoupled, challenging the common perception that they are inextricably linked.— Study authors, Cell Reports Medicine
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