Dr. Thomas Perls, who will be speaking at 7 p.m. Thursday in Emerson Suites, founded the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University in 1995 and also authored the book “Living to 100.” Additionally, Dr. Perls designed the “Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator” which enables people to enter some basic information about their family, lifestyles, and personal history and then approximates how old one will live to be.

Staff Writer Lily Oberman spoke to Dr. Perls about his work with the Centenarian Study, the anti-aging industry and super-centenarians.

Lily Oberman: Why do you think it’s important to study centenarians?

Thomas Perls: We [at the Study] think they are incredible models of aging well, and we want to understand the environmental, genetic, and luck-related factors that allow them to do so with the hope that we might find some factors that translate into helping others age well.

LO: What kind of factors have you found that help people live longer?

TP: Aging is a very complex trait. The ability to survive to a very old age, preferably in good health, is going to be a complex interaction of having some genes that might protect you and slow down the rate of aging, and lacking genes that are bad for you, environmental factors that might be bad for you. The very tricky thing is that this complex combination of factors is going to be very different for different people – there isn’t going to be one recipe for all.

LO: Was studying centenarians something you were always interested in?

TP: I became interested in centenarians as a result of my day-to-day clinical duties as a physician. I came across a couple of centenarian patients who were in really good shape, and thought that was unusual. That made a few light bulbs go off, [telling me] to look more into it. I found that very few people at the time had really studied centenarians. So that’s how the Study was really started.

LO: How has the Study grown since you founded it?

TP: It’s now the largest study of centenarians in the world. We have close to 2000 subjects. It’s also the largest study of supercentenarians – people who live to be 110 or older. Just to give you an idea of how rare these individuals are, there’s about one person in 6000 who is a centenarian. On the other hand, there is about one person per 7 million people who live to be supercentenarians, and there’s about 350 of those people worldwide.

LO: What kinds of things will you be discussing in the presentation you will be giving, called the “Whys and Hows of Living to 100?”

TP: I’ll be talking about what our main observations have been, as well as some of my other work around helping people understand factors that will help people age better and avoid age-related disease. I’ll talk about the anti-aging industry as well – anti-aging quackery. Some of these hormone treatments and other things that that industry promotes can be really bad for you.

LO: Have you ever had someone contact you because they were worried or upset about the results they got from the life expectancy calculator?

TP: No. One of the interesting comments I get is from people who say that they’re in their 80s and the calculator says they should be dead … they are living longer than what their behaviors would predict.

LO: Is there any one experience that really stood out to you over the years that you’ve been studying centenarians?

TP: Just this March, I went to visit [the oldest man in the world, who is 113 years old,] in Great Falls, Montana. He was in perhaps the best shape I’ve ever seen a centenarian in. He was completely independently functioning, he went on and on about life in the 1920s and the Great Depression and never skipped a beat, never repeated himself. He was just absolutely amazing, a true living, historical treasure. Just given his crazy age, that blew me away.