TY - JOUR T1 - Purpose in Life Among Centenarian Offspring. JF - Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences & Social Sciences Y1 - 2020 A1 - Marone, Sarah A1 - Bloore, Katherine A1 - Sebastiani, Paola A1 - Flynn, Christopher A1 - Leonard, Brittany A1 - Whitaker, Kelsey A1 - Mostowy, Marilyn A1 - Thomas T Perls A1 - Andersen, Stacy L KW - Adult children KW - Logistic Regression KW - Mortality KW - Multigenerational KW - Parents KW - Purpose in life AB -

Objectives: Purpose in life (PIL), a feeling of meaning and direction in life, is associated with favorable health outcomes including lower mortality and reduced risk of disease, disability, and cognitive impairment. Since centenarian offspring have been shown to have long health spans we sought to examine whether they have higher PIL than individuals without familial longevity.

Method: We compared PIL scores from the Ryff Scales of Psychological Well-Being in centenarian offspring from the New England Centenarian Study (N=361, mean age=82.0 years) with three referent groups: spouses, birth cohort-matched referents, and Health and Retirement Study (HRS) participants.

Results: Logistic regression analyses adjusted for age, sex, education, and marital status indicated greater odds of high PIL among centenarian offspring compared with spouse (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.92, 95% CI 1.002-3.68, p=.049) and birth cohort referents (aOR 2.64, 95% CI 1.36-5.14, p=.004). Offspring had an almost three times greater odds of having high PIL than HRS participants (OR 2.93, 95% CI 2.17-3.96, p<0.0001).

Discussion: Higher PIL is associated with being an offspring of a long-lived parent and may play a role in the ability to delay age-associated illnesses and functional decline. Increasing purposefulness may be a target for interventions to promote healthy aging.

U1 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29522128?dopt=Abstract ER -