Does Your Mother Help Determine How Long You'll Live?

From Fight Aging comes this post.

The work of Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova on the influence of parents on their children's longevity is receiving press attention again.

Earlier actuarial studies showing that birth order correlates with life expectancy is explained by the mother's age relationship - younger mothers seem to mean a greater life expectancy for the children. The chances of living to the ripe old age of 100 -- and beyond -- nearly double for a child born to a woman before her 25th birthday, Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova reported. The father's age is less important to longevity, according to their research.

In a previous study, the husband and wife research team of Gavrilov and Gavrilova identified birth order as a possible predictor of an exceptionally long life. They observed that first-born children, especially daughters, are much more likely to live to age 100. But their latest research suggests that it is the young age of the mother, rather than birth order, which is significant to longevity. This can be tied in with the researchers' reliability theory of aging - younger mothers are producing children with a lower initial load of cellular or genetic damage.

This gets added to the continuous discussion of having children later in life (something that I generally support). Cellular damage aside, many women who are somewhat older at birth make better mothers (and their partners better fathers) then they might have had they not waited to have children. Don't look to science to settle this debate.