Centenarians in Cuba and the “Study of Cuban Centenarians”

Juana Bautista de La Candelaria Rodríguez was born on 2nd of February 1885, according to tome I, page 35, of the Civil Register of the town of Campechuela (province of Granma), at a time when Cuba was still a part of Spain. There she lived until her death on 24^th December 2012, aged 127, considered the oldest woman in Cuba and, perhaps, the world. She could remember her childhood when opportunities were different to today’s, but always based on the family and communal solidarity. During the years of the study, she was still the centre of the family which supported her. Coming from a family of 13 siblings with difficulties, she only had three children with her only husband, whom she outlived, perhaps for this reason. Grandmother to six, great-grandmother to 15 and great-great-grandmother to 7, Juana attributed her incredible longevity to work and the good local food. She never drank rum nor smoked, but she did drink coffee.

Juana is not the only example and increasingly more people are reaching the maximum levels of human existence. While in 1996 this “select club” consisted of 57,000 people worldwide, it will rise to 447.000 in 2040. Longevity should be understood as a lifelong in years, but also a healthy one, and this is one of the most important challenges for science and for society. This consideration has been met by Cuba in the framework of the 5-year plan of 2005 in a remarkable project called the “Study of Cuban Centenarians”, which studies everybody aged 100 or more. The project encompasses demography, education, the socio-working background, reproductive patterns, lifestyle, nutrition, anthropological and biochemical evaluations, pathologies and the functional and psychic state of centenarians, synergic factors which may answer such questions as are posed by this stage of our life cycle. The study thus looks for influencing factors in the process of healthy ageing which allow the development of preventive programmes of intervention among ageing populations.

In Cuba, 1,488 centenarians were found (13.24 for every 100,000 inhabitants),

more women (el 60.3%) than men (39.7%). Of the centenarians 59% were identified in the project as being of European origin, 23% as Afro-Cubans and 18% as mixed race. 52.4% had never smoked and 63.3% had never drank alcohol, figures which are very different for the rest of the country. With the exception of one centenarian who was in an old people’s home, the rest lived their families as respected and loved members. The distribution of centenarians over the island is not uniform: the highest rates correspond to the east (provinces of Las Tunas, Gramma and Santiago de Cuba), and are independent of the percentage of elderly people in each region of the country. There is a clear regression to anthropometric and functional values of the previous stage (which we call “older adult”) the impact being greater in women. It is harder to classify nutritional state, as the use of Body Mass Index has no valid references for this ontogenetic stage, so that there are diverging results from using different methodologies for evaluation. As a result, it is clear that we need to work with our own percentile tables and establish categorisation of somatic-nutritional rates from them, as well as finding out the real energy needs of this centenarian population to establish reference values for the haemo-chemical variables used to establish their nutritional state.

The “Study of Cuban Centenarians” project is a wonderful effort carried out in Cuba; it is well planned and executed, and should be an international reference for healthy ageing. Although no miraculous formulas exist, the stories of the lives of Cuban centenarians teach us that the adaptive capacity of human beings allows us to function even at very advanced ages. The challenge is to find out how to boost this capacity in the best possible conditions. Building the long road to solving this question has started with the “Study of Cuban Centenarians”.

Consuelo Prado Martínez, is a bioanthropologist, and teacher at the Biology department at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and Esmir Camps Calzadilla, is a doctor and Professor of Physiology at the Universidad de Ciencias Médica de La Habana (UCMH). Consuelo Prado directed Esmir Camps’s PhD together with UCMH’s Dr. Mercedes Gámez Fonseca, who died shortly before the PhD was defended in 2012. Esmir Camps’s Doctoral Thesis is titled Anthropometric, functional and nutritional characteristics of Cuban centenarians and was the first within the framework of the “Study of Cuban Centenarians” project and the joint programme of the UCMH-UAM. Esmir Camps was awarded the annual national prize to the best PhD in Preclinical Medical Science in Cuba.