Why Supercentenarians Die
The Daily Bruin looks at the work of the Gerontology Research Group and Supercentenarian Research Foundation: "UCLA's Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine recently autopsied 115-year-old Gertrude Baines, formerly the oldest person in the world. Baines was one of the current 77 validated living supercentenarians in the world, a group including any person aged 110 years or older. She died Sept. 11, 2009 from Senile Systemic Amyloidosis ... Supercentenarians appear to escape from the common diseases that kill ordinary people, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes, but there's another form of the grim reaper waiting in the wings ... Senile Systemic Amyloidosis is a common cause of death among supercentenarians. The mechanism involves a slow process in which a native protein called Transthyretin, which transports thyroid hormones to the body, becomes increasingly unstable. As humans age, the carrier protein begins to unravel and misfold, sticking to the inside of blood vessels and restricting blood flow. As a result, the heart undergoes hypertrophy, growing and working harder in an attempt to compensate ... The consequence of this process includes the symptoms of congestive heart failure, but without an autopsy, the attending physician would never know the underlying cause. ... Now that we've started this research, we can draw attention to Senile Systemic Amyloidosis and we can try to find a cure for this disease. Maybe supercentenarians could live healthy even longer."
Link: http://www.dailybruin.com/articles/2010/3/5/autopsy-115-year-old-aids-research/
Centenarians die of the same conditions as non-centenarians, only a little later on. Humans are unable to treat or cure the conditions people commonly die of not even in their early stages.
Tiny Mouse is just incorrect. We die of different things at different ages. This is easy to discover. Search for LCWK1. There you can see what killed Americans at different ages. In that, you can see that only 4.1% of those over 100 die of cancer. Cancer peaks much earlier. 34.3% of people who die at 65-69 years die of cancer. Where it is the #1 killer at that age. No. The whole picture changes.
That dogma of things just being delayed is denialism. The fact is there are a ton of disease down the road, if people were to move by the millions into the 110+ space. We already know this is the case, because they autopsy these people and see diseases they have never seen before, all the time.
And they can and should detect transthyretin amyloid. It also deposits in the hands, where it causes carpal tunnel. A little checking, and it would be detected. They don't bother, because there is no treatment yet, other than liver transplant. And that does not get rid of it, it just stops the progression. It is conceivable that some Alzheimer's drug might work, to some extent, off label.
Well, apparently there are drugs for it, they just want more than $200,000 a year for them.