Centenarian Parents Associated with Lower Cancer Risk in Children

Children of parents who live long are less likely than others to develop cancer, according to a new study.

The latest study was conducted by researchers from University of Exeter Medical School, who found that people who had a long-lived parent had a 24 percent lower chance of developing cancer.

"Previous studies have shown that the children of centenarians tend to live longer with less heart disease, but this is the first robust evidence that the children of longer-lived parents are also less likely to get cancer. We also found that they are less prone to diabetes or suffering a stroke," William Henley, from the University of Exeter Medical School, said in a news release.

In the study, long-lived parents were defined as a mother who lived past 91 years or a father who lived past 87 years, while the average age for parents was around 70 to 91 years. The study was based on data obtained from 9,764 men and women enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study. All the study participants were American and were followed on an average for about 18 years, from 1992 to 2010.

The study also included researchers from the National Institute for Health and Medical Research in France, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa, who found that mortality of children depended on the life span of their parents. Researchers found that for each decade that the parents lived after 65 years, the mortality rate for the children dropped by 19 percent.

"Obviously children of older parents are not immune to contracting cancer or any other diseases of ageing, but our evidence shows that rates are lower. We also found that this inherited resistance to age-related diseases gets stronger the older their parents lived," Henley added.

The health benefits of parents living until very old age were passed to children, but not to their sons- or daughters-in-law, showing that the environment wasn't associated between parents living for longer duration and lower risk of cancer. "If the findings resulted from cultural or lifestyle factors, you might expect these effects to extend to husbands and wives in at least some cases, but there was no impact whatsoever," said Ambarish Dutta, who worked on the project at the University of Exeter Medical School.

The study is published in the Journals of Gerontology: Series A.