Insights on aging and exceptional longevity from longitudinal data: novel findings from the Framingham Heart Study

Age trajectories of physiological indices contain important information about aging-related changes in the human organism and therefore may help us understand human longevity. The goal of this study is to investigate whether shapes of such trajectories earlier in life affect the residual life span distribution. We used longitudinal limited access data from seven physiological indices and life spans of respective individuals collected in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). These include: diastolic blood pressure (DBP), pulse pressure (PP), body mass index (BMI), serum cholesterol (SCH), blood glucose (BG), hematocrit (HC), and pulse rate (PR). We developed a method for assigning individuals to groups of potentially long-lived (PLL) and potentially medium-lived (PML) groups using age trajectories of physiological indices at the age interval between 40 and 60 years. The analysis shows that the longevity of individuals who survived to age of 65 depends on the behavior of the physiological indices between 40 and 60 years of age.