Impact
Thomas Perls, MD, MPH, is a geriatrician and researcher on human exceptional longevity. He founded and directs the New England Centenarian Study, which describes itself as the largest study of centenarians and their families, and is a principal investigator of the NIA-funded Long Life Family Study. His group reported that siblings of centenarians have markedly higher chances of reaching 100, that children of centenarians have substantially lower rates of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and hypertension in their seventies, and that exceptional longevity clusters in families. Work on semi-supercentenarians and supercentenarians found that these individuals tend to delay age-related diseases until the last few percent of their lives, evidence consistent with the compression of morbidity hypothesis. He also led genetic studies, including a model of genetic markers that distinguished people aged 105 and older from controls, and whole-genome sequencing of two supercentenarians. He is a Professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine in the Section of Geriatrics, and has been a public critic of the 'anti-aging' industry.
Metrics
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Research output
317 works · 15,839 citations · h-index 64 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Novel genetic associations for blood pressure identified via gene-alcohol interaction in up to 570K individuals across multiple ancestries ↗ 2018 · 1,174 citations
- A catalog of genetic loci associated with kidney function from analyses of a million individuals ↗ 2019 · 945 citations
- Morbidity Profiles of Centenarians: Survivors, Delayers, and Escapers ↗ 2003 · 527 citations
- Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans ↗ 2012 · 470 citations
- Target genes, variants, tissues and transcriptional pathways influencing human serum urate levels ↗ 2019 · 442 citations
Research funding
23 NIH awards · USD 53M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Identifying protective omics profiles in centenarians and translating these into preventive and therapeutic strategies National Institute on Aging · 2022 · USD 5M
- Identifying protective omics profiles in centenarians and translating these into preventive and therapeutic strategies National Institute on Aging · 2023 · USD 5M
- Identifying protective omics profiles in centenarians and translating these into preventive and therapeutic strategies National Institute on Aging · 2019 · USD 5M
- Identifying protective omics profiles in centenarians and translating these into preventive and therapeutic strategies National Institute on Aging · 2025 · USD 5M
- Resilience/Resistance to Alzheimer's Disease in Centenarians and Offspring (RADCO) National Institute on Aging · 2024 · USD 5M