Woman who lived to age 117 had genes keeping her cells ‘younger’, study shows

The US-born woman who was the world’s oldest living person before she died in Spain last August at age 117 once attributed her longevity to “luck and good genetics”. And, evidently, Maria Branyas Morera was right.

A study of Branyas’s microbiome and DNA that scientists began conducting before her death reportedly determined that the genes she inherited allowed her cells to essentially feel and behave as if they were 17 years younger than they actually were. And Branyas’s microbiota – which primarily refers to the bacteria in people’s guts that has a role in keeping them healthy – mirrored that of an infant, according to the research led by University of Barcelona genetics professor Manel Esteller, a leading expert on ageing.

The daily newspaper Ara, which covers the Catalan region where she resided much of her life, first reported on the results of the study into what was described as Branyas’s “privileged genome” earlier in March. Esteller’s team found that Branyas retained her lucidity until almost the very end of her life.

And the ailments that she grappled with during her extended golden years were largely limited to joint pain and hearing loss.

Ara reported that Esteller’s work on Branyas amounts to the most complete research yet into a so-called supercentenarian – someone who is 110 or older – as well as some possible explanations for the longevity that marks some lives in particular.

The researchers noted how Branyas made a number of healthy lifestyle choices that also helped her take advantage of her unique genetic makeup. She adhered to a Mediterranean diet that included three yogurts daily.

She avoided drinking alcohol and smoking, enjoyed walks, and constantly surrounded herself with family and loved ones, all of which apparently aided her in staving off declines both physical and mental that could have shortened her life, the researchers concluded.

Esteller and his colleagues said that they hope the study into Branyas provides useful information to those seeking to develop medications and treatments for age-related illnesses.

They said Branyas exemplified how ageing and sickness – at least in certain conditions – do not necessarily have to go hand-in-hand. And the results of the genetic study done on her “challenge the perception that [the two] are inexorably linked”, they also said, according to Spain’s EFE news service.

Branyas was born in San Francisco on 4 March 1907, after her parents moved from Spain and Mexico to the US. She also spent time in Texas and New Orleans before her family returned to Spain in 1915 – amid the first world war – and settled in Catalonia.

Some of the major global events that she subsequently lived through were the Spanish civil war, the second world war, the 1918 flu pandemic and Covid-19.

She made international news headlines by contracting Covid in 2020, when Spain was one of the countries hit hardest by the virus and protective vaccines were not yet available. But her Covid bout was asymptomatic, and she recovered relatively easily.

Branyas gained recognition from Guinness World Records as the globe’s oldest person in January 2023 after the death of the French nun Lucile Randon, 118. Asked by the Guinness organization’s website to contemplate her longevity, Branyas chalked it up “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people”.

“I think longevity is also being lucky,” added Branyas, who expressed herself later in life with a voice-to-text device. “Luck and good genetics”.

A widowed mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, she died on 19 August at a nursing home in the town of Olot in north-eastern Spain where she lived for her final two decades.

As of Wednesday, the world’s oldest person was Brazil’s Inah Canabarro Lucas, 116, according to the LongeviQuest website, an authority on supercentenarians.