Superagers - Legal & Medical Services (PPS) | AOPA
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Superagers
Superagers
June 1, 2026<br>By Kenneth Stahl, MD, FACS
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Beyond the headlines and pop culture promises of eternal youth; true advances in organ transplants, epigenetic clocks, and cellular reprogramming are redefining aging to help people live longer, and stay healthier as the years pile up. Some Silicon Valley billionaires publicly declare they are going to use all kinds of technology and don’t plan to die – we’ll see.
Back in 1965, a 90-year-old French woman named Jeanne Calment signed a “reverse mortgage" deal with her lawyer, a guy named André-François Raffray. In exchange for ownership of her luxurious Parisian apartment, Raffray—then aged 47—agreed to pay Mme Calment 2,500 francs a month and let her live there until she died. It sounded like he’d made a good bet, but unfortunately for the lawyer, he didn’t know that he'd signed a contract with the woman who would go on to become the oldest recorded person in history. She would outlive her only child and her only grandchild, and despite being twice Raffray’s age when they made their deal, Jeanne incredibly outlived him too. The lawyer passed away in 1995 at age 77, by which time he'd paid Jeanne more than double the apartment’s value—turned out not to be such a good bet after all. Her date of birth was preserved with her original birth certificate and her age was documented in over 25 census surveys. She was born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875 (14 years before the Eiffel Tower was built) and lived on to become the oldest person ever verified, reaching the age of 122 years and 164 days when she passed away on August 4, 1997. We’ve talked before in these posts about keys to healthy aging but reaching 122 is an entirely different matter. These folks are called “superagers,” and it takes a whole lot of good luck, good genes, and good habits to get there.
Beyond the headlines and pop culture promises of eternal youth, true advances in organ transplants, epigenetic clocks, and cellular reprogramming are redefining aging to help people live longer and stay healthier as the years pile up. Some Silicon Valley billionaires publicly declare they are going to use all kinds of technology and don’t plan to die—we’ll see. It’s even gotten into the heads of some world leaders. A little while back an open microphone picked up Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping talking about biotechnology and organ transplants and their goal of living to 150 years or even achieving immortality—and probably planning to stay in power until then. All the medical literature on superagers stresses that adding years is not enough; preserving quality of life is crucial. This has given rise to the concept of “healthspan” added to models of lifespan. The main focus of healthspan is not just getting old—really old like into the triple digits—but all the time maintaining your cognitive and intellectual well-being. So, the key to super aging is all in our heads, literally; it’s brain health. We've talked in these pages about healthy habits to help preserve cognitive health, and modern medicine is all over this too.
“Geroprotective” (protecting against the negative effects of aging) drugs are among the most immediately promising treatments to help us slow down the biological aging process and are designed to target molecular pathways common to many age-related diseases. We’ve already talked in these pages about GLP-1s (now available in oral pill forms), and researchers have shown this class of meds has some age-protective effects. Most current research focuses on metformin, rapamycin, and senolytics. Senolytics are a whole new class of meds that are designed to clean up aging cells and promote new cell growth—cellular regeneration. Since the key to healthspan is youthful cognition and intellect as we age, it’s most important for that regeneration to occur in brain cells, since it’s cell loss in our heads that portends cognitive decline and senility. Until very recently, no neuroscientists thought that such a thing as brain cell regeneration existed, but new research has brought some good news and it correlates with just this issue of brain cell regrowth and maintaining cognitive function.
There’s an area of the brain called the hippocampus and it’s vital to our intellectual function. The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure within the brain’s temporal lobe that plays a vital role in forming memories, spatial navigation, social interactions, and emotional processing. The name is appropriate and comes from the Greek words for “sea monster,” reflecting its distinctive curved shape that looks like a mad seahorse. It’s not a storage vault for memories; rather, it acts more like a processing area, a temporary workshop, where new experiences are processed and prepared for long-term storage in other parts of the brain,...