In Brazil we live a lot, a lot, even decidedly above the average age for a human being, often in good health and without particular cognitive disorders. According to research led byUniversity of Sao Paulothe history of the great South American country, which has led to incredible genetic diversification, is the key to understanding why the longest-lived women and men in history lived and live there.
The history of Brazil and its genetic implications
Portuguese colonizers arrived in Brazil starting in 1500 and, between the 17th and 19th centuries, around 4 million Africans, mainly from West Africa, were deported to the country and reduced to slavery.
Subsequently, between the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of European immigrants arrived, mainly from Italy, Germany and Portugal. And 1908 saw the beginning of a significant wave of Japanese immigration, giving rise to what would become the largest Japanese community outside of Japan, where, moreover, longevity records are not infrequently recorded.
What does this mean? Researchers have no doubts: genetic diversification has made Brazilians “stronger”, holders of DNA rich in genes that have allowed some of them to defy old age and death.
How the study was conducted and what it showed
The study “recruited” over 160 centenarians, including 20 validated supercentenarians, distributed across different Brazilian regions with heterogeneous social, cultural and environmental contexts. Among the participants there was also Sister Inahrecognized as the longest-living person in the world until her death on April 30, 2025 at the age of 116.
The cohort also included the two longest-living men in the world, one who died last November at the age of 112, the other still alive at an extraordinary 113 years.
At the time of contact with the researchers, some Brazilian centenarians were still lucid and independent in basic daily activities. And there’s more: many participants came from poor regions, with limited access to modern medical care throughout their lives, offering a rare opportunity to investigate mechanisms of resilience beyond medical intervention.
Familiarity
And yes, genetics matter a lot, one case highlighted this with particular clarity: a 110-year-old woman in the cohort has cousins aged 100, 104 and 106, representing one of the longest-lived families ever documented in Brazil. The oldest of them, currently 106 years old, was a swimming champion at 100 years old.
This family cluster agrees with previous evidence indicating that siblings of centenarians are 5 to 17 times more likely to achieve centenarian status.
Investigating these rare family clusters offers an exceptional window into the polygenic inheritance of resilience – explains Mateus V. de Castro, first author of the work – and can help reveal the genetic and epigenetic contributions to extreme longevity
Longevity genes
The research has also highlighted how, in general, the peripheral blood cells of supercentenarians maintain proteasomal activity comparable to that of much younger individuals: in practice, the proteasome remains incredibly efficient, that protein complex capable of degrading damaged, badly folded or no longer necessary proteins, helping the body to “stay young”.
And this situation, in Brazilian supercentenarians, is maintained even without particular food restrictions.
The immune system
The Covid-19 pandemic – we know – has killed many elderly people, not only those with previous pathologies, also due to the immune system which, with age, tends to weaken.
Fine, but three Brazilian supercentenarians from the cohort survived COVID-19 in 2020, before the first vaccine was made available: immunological scientists revealed that these individuals had robust levels of IgG immunoglobulins and neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as plasma proteins and metabolites related to the innate immune response.
Resilience
And it doesn’t end there: supercentenarians represent much more than examples of prolonged biological survival, because they embody resistance, adaptability and resilience.
In other words, beyond simply surviving extreme age, these individuals actively resist markers of improvement, offering perspectives that can reconfigure understandings of longevity and inform future interventions to extend healthy life expectancy.
Which is (perhaps) the goal of modern medicine: to prolong not life expectancy itself, but health prospects. Which can be very different.
The work was published on Genomic Press.
Sources: Eurekalert / Genomic Press
