Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age

Centenarians, once a rarity, are the world's fastest growing age group: there are currently about 50,000 people over 100 in the United States alone, almost three times as many as there were in 1980. Centenarians are setting the gold standard for healthy aging. What can we learn from these pioneers? How can people decades younger apply the centenarians' longevity lessons to their own lives? These are the questions Harvard scientists Thomas Perls and Margery Hutter Silver set out to answer when they launched the New England Centenarian Study. As they probed beyond disease to identify the parameters of an energetic later life, Perls and Silver realized that the key to preserving health and vitality lies not in learning how people stay young, but in understanding how they age well. By identifying lifestyle patterns, vitamins, and medications that contribute to aging well -- and may even help slow down the aging process -- they show how all of us can maximize the healthy portion of the life-span. Filled with personal profiles, informational sidebars, and quizzes, Living to 100 offers inspiration and solid scientific information to the more than seventy-five million people alive today who can look forward to their ninth and tenth decades.

Thomas Perls, M.D., M.P.H., is assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and a geriatrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is the founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). His work has been published in the major scientific journals, described in the popular press, and highlighted in television documentaries and national news shows.

Margery Hutter Silver, Ed.D., a neuropsychologist, is associate director of the NECS, a clinical instructor in psychology at the Harvard Medical School, and a staff member of the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is co-editor of the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

John F. Lauerman, a freelance writer in Brookline, Massachusetts, is health columnist for Harvard Magazine and an award-winning contributor to national magazines. He is the author, with David Nathan, M.D., of Diabetes: Understand Your Condition, Make the Right Treatment Choices, and Cope Effectively.