BLOOM, FISHER AND THE HUNT FOR HUNDRED-YEAR-OLDS
IN THE EARLY ’90S, when Dr. Thomas Perls was a third-year fellow in geriatrics training at Harvard Medical School, he was assigned to look after two centenarians, and he assumed they would be the sickest patients on his roster: “This idea was quite prevalent at the time – the older you get, the sicker you get.
“The literature indicated that the rate of [getting] Alzheimer’s disease increased at a very fast rate beyond the age of 85 – so one would expect that everyone over the age of 100 would have Alzheimer’s disease.” But then he met Mrs. Bloom and Mr. Fisher.
Bloom was an accomplished pianist who lived on her own and still played at venues around Boston. Perls knew from their conversations she was still mentally sharp, but Bloom impressed him even further when he heard the 101-year-old in concert playing the difficult music of Chopin – and playing it well.
Fisher had been a tailor all his life. The 103-year-old could usually be found in the hospital’s occupational therapy department, not getting treatment, but mending the clothes of the patients there, or teaching others how to mend. “If he wasn’t doing that,” says Perls, “he was robbing the cradle – dating his 85-yearold girlfriend.”
At the time, Perls was looking for a research project and Bloom and Fisher seemed to pose a question worth answering. “I knew I had to find more people to see if these two were a fluke and everyone else [age 100 and up] were as predicted.”
Perls initially focused on eight
towns in the Boston area, scanning birthday announcements in the local papers, combing voter registration lists and conducting interviews with the centenarians he found. He discovered that while Bloom and Fisher were not complete anomalies, they were in the minority of successful agers: Only 20 per cent of centenarians were in fairly good shape and free of dementia, while 80 per cent had various health issues.
“So, you might say, ‘Well, what’s so great about that?’” Quite a bit, it turned out. Perls learned that, despite the final result, most centenarians in his study had been functionally independent until about the age of 93 before they declined – which was still beyond average life expectancy, and beyond the age at which most people were expected to have developed dementia.
To find out how these 100-yearolds had managed to markedly delay or escape the diseases of aging, Perls founded the New England Centenarian Study, which, since its inception in 1995, has grown into the longest-running investigation of its kind, with more than 2,000 centenarians and their families enrolled from seven countries, including 107 supercentenarians.
One of its most striking findings is that today, says Perls, now a professor of medicine and geriatrics at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, “most people have a shot at making it to 90,” and one in five have the opportunity to get to 100. “That’s a remarkable number.”