Predicting Successful Aging in a Population-Based Sample of Georgia Centenarians
Figure 1
(a) Exponential growth of Centenarians in England over the last century [2]. (b) Network of morbidity in centenarians in the GCS [3] using lifetime prevalence of 11 most common chronic diseases in the GCS. All pairwise associations that were not significant by an exact test were set to zero, and the remaining significant (with α = 0.05) pairwise correlations () between chronic diseases and were all positive. These significant pairwise positive associations were graphically rendered using the distance 1- and multi-dimensional scaling [9] to compute coordinates for the chronic diseases. The coordinates were then graphed as a network [10]. COPD denotes chronic pulmonary obstruction disease. Chronic and acute pneumonia were not distinguished in the medical questionnaire. (c) Average linkage [11] was used to compute a dendrogram independently relating the 11 chronic diseases based on their pairwise correlations {}. (d) The distribution of GDRS scores [12] in centenarians is compared with the distribution of GDRS scores in 80 octogenarians as a control group. A GDRS score of 4–7 is indicative of dementia, a score of 3, of mild cognitive impairment, and a score of 1-2, as unaffected.
