• Posted August 28, 2026

Your Parents' Age Might Improve Your Health Outlook, Study Says

People whose parents have reached age 100 can expect to reap some health benefits from their folks’ longevity, a new study says.

They tend to live longer and have substantially lower risks of heart disease and high blood pressure, researchers reported Aug. 26 in JAMA Network Open.

“This study provides strong evidence that the offspring of centenarians share some of their parents’ advantages in healthy aging,” said researcher Paola Sebastiani, director of the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. 

“These findings bring us closer to understanding the biological factors that may help protect against age-related disease and promote longer, healthier lives,” she said in a news release.

Senior researcher Dr. Sofiya Milman, a professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said studying families with exceptional longevity can provide a unique window into the biology of healthy aging.

“Our findings provide a strong rationale for studying centenarians and their families to uncover those biological factors that promote longevity and protect these individuals from age-related diseases,” Milman said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers compared more than 2,300 children of centenarians — folks who lived to age 100 or older — to 2,700 people whose parents lived to age 85 at most.

These people participated in three different long-running studies in New York City, the United States and the U.K., researchers said.

At any given age, children of centenarians had a 42% lower risk of death; 33% lower risk of heart disease; and a 32% lower risk of hypertension, the study found.

On average, the children of centenarians also died about three years later and developed high blood pressure about five years later than others.

However, having a parent who reached age 100 did not appear to provide consistent protection against illnesses like stroke and cancer, researchers found.

“The overall consistency of these findings across these quite different studies was especially noteworthy and reinforces the idea that exceptional longevity runs in families,” lead researcher Eric Reed said in a news release. He’s a staff scientist in medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“This is not to say that lifestyle doesn’t count — healthy behaviors remain important for everyone,” he said. “But some people from families with exceptional longevity appear to enjoy biological advantages that help them remain healthy despite the environmental and behavioral factors that affect us all.”

However, researchers can’t say why the children of long-lived people have these advantages.

“This study wasn’t designed to identify the specific inherited traits that benefit centenarians’ children,” Milman said.

“Ultimately, those factors could lead to treatments that mimic the effects of naturally occurring longevity mechanisms, potentially helping people who did not inherit exceptional longevity to live longer and healthier lives,” she said.

More information

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has more on the role of genetics in aging.

SOURCE: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, news release, Aug. 26, 2026