Los Angeles Tour

with access to a video clip of our CNN-TV Interview with Mrs. Gertrude Baines,113, of Los Angeles. We are sorry that this site has been temporarily disabled, and we hope to have it up and running again soon. If you click on the MySpace Logo, you will simply get an error message. Soon, the website should appear accompanied by classical music (Demitri Schostakovich). BTW, if you already have a MySpace account, please add us as a "friend." -- MySpace Site Administrator

July 10, 2006; Click on the SRF Logo above to consider making a contribution to our newly-formed Supercentenarian Research Foundation to further scientific research into to why Supercentenarians live as long as they do? (And, conversely, why they don't live longer still?) Now that we are incorporated and have held several meetings of our Board of Directors, we are nearing approval of our 501(c)(3) non profit, tax-exempt status with the US Internal Revenue Service. Nevertheless, we are urgently in need of "seed money" immediately to fund the formation of an international team of physicians and investigators who could travel to visit each of our living Supercentenarians around the world in person before they are no longer with us. Obviously, the data that we plan to obtain is a precious resource that could disappear from our radar screens unless we get started right away. If you can assist us with a pledge of even as little as $100.00 or more, please click on the logo above to learn the details of how to accomplish this contribution.

-- L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Director and Treasurer of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation.


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Click for the current GRG Table of Worldwide Living Supercentenarians.

Our high for 2005 was 75, while our all-time high record for 2006 year was 87 Supercentenarians on November 9th. Our Chief Claims investigator, Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, GA, has speculated that there are systematic seasonal variations each year with highs during the late Spring and early Summer and a fall-off in the latter part of the Summer or early Fall. This observation is purely empirical, and we have no scientific rationale for a mechanism for why this should be so. There may be statistical artifacts in the way our Japanese cases are reported to us by their government on an irregular basis.


The large ratio of women to men cannot be explained in simple terms. Although there is no shortage of hypotheses to explain why women outlive men by such a large margin at the end of human life (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive and therefore more likely to die violently or as soldiers in war, while women were always, but no longer, likely to die in child birth) none of these hypotheses are fully convincing. However, the ostensible protective effects of estrogen (and the lesser harmful effects of cortisol, as women are presumed on average to have less chronic stress) are the most plausible. However, the present differential life expectancy in favor of women for men-and-women-living-to-age-65 is expected to decline in future decades, as the rate of heart disease, our number-one killer, equilibrates once women pass menopause (and their estrogen is depleted -- in the absence of HRT. By the way, not all forms of HRT are protective, as we have sadly discovered in a surprising clinical trial with Premarin showing that it may not only be non-protective, it could actually contribute to a higher mortality compared with controls taking nothing at all (especially in women whose onset of HRT was not immediately following menopause to alleviate hot-flashes, but a few years later on)! The Route-of-Administration [pill vs. patch] and first-pass [through the liver] effects may be important. Bioidentical vs. synthetic estrogens could also be important. Clinical trials are presently underway to tease out these uncertainties. Curiously, we have seen a recent hypotheses that women have longer telomeres compared with men). Nevertheless, based on our own empirical statistics here at the GRG, the extraordinary longevity difference by gender in "the oldest old" has not shrunk over the last five years. As just one observation, the world's oldest person for the last five years has always been a woman (although this has not been true throughout history and it is not currently true following the death of Lizzie Bolden of Tennessee (December 11, 2006)). See our Table D for more details).