Study of world's oldest person reveals what helped her live to 117

When Maria Branyas Morera died last year at 117 years and 168 days old, she was the oldest known person in the world. Before she died, she asked doctors to study her.

Dr. Manel Esteller, chairman of Genetics at the University of Barcelona's School of Medicine, spent three years analyzing Branyas' health. A study, published online Wednesday, by Esteller and a cohort of colleagues found that a mix of factors contributed to Branyas' longevity.

"The conclusion is that the clues for extreme longevity are a mix between what we inherited from our parents and what we do in our lives," Esteller said. "And this mix, the percentage depends, but it can be ... half and half."

Branyas "had very good genes that protect against many disorders, many genetic variants that nobody has seen before," Esteller said. She also had "very good habits." She didn't smoke or drink alcohol, and had a diet rich in fish, olive oil and yogurt — eating three yogurts each day, according to Esteller.

The yogurt was plain without added sugar, which replenishes the gut with good bacteria, helping to combat inflammation, Esteller said.

Chronic inflammation is one of the main causes of aging and disease, he said.

"These are good bacteria that provide an advantage to humans," Esteller added.

The study noted that, "whether the dominance of the Bifidobacterium [beneficial gut bacteria] related genus is fully attributable or not to the yogurt diet cannot be completely confirmed since that would have required a longitudinal study with sample collection over several years. However, we believe that it is likely that a beneficial effect of yogurt ingestion via modulation of the gut ecosystem could have contributed to her well-being and advanced age."

Branyas once posted on social media about her love for yogurt, saying it "gives life," and hers was a long one. She was born in 1907 in San Francisco and had lived in Spain since she was 8. She survived two world wars and two pandemics, and had three children and 13 great-grandchildren.

In addition to living a long life, she also lived a healthy one — free of cancer, cardiovascular disease or dementia, according to Esteller.

The picture that emerges from studying Branyas "shows that extremely advanced age and poor health are not intrinsically linked and that both processes can be distinguished and dissected at the molecular level," the study, published in Cell Reports Medicine, says.

Researchers said that to conduct the study, "samples from the subject were obtained from four different sources: total peripheral blood, saliva, urine, and stool at different times."

It also noted some limitations, including that aging and extreme longevity "are probably highly individualized processes," so "drawing broadly applicable conclusions from a single subject should be taken with caution."

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