Gender and functional decline among centenarians

We hypothesized that Barthel Scores, a measure of functional ability, in Centenarian subjects would be lower in Centenarians reporting early onset of a subset of age-associated illness than those reporting delayed or no onset of such illnesses. 409 participants or their proxies completed health history questionnaires and Barthel tests (males=97, mean age=102 +/- 3.0; females=312, mean age=10g +/- 2.6). We investigated the effect of sex, number of co-morbidities, and initial age of onset of initial age-associated disease on the Barthel score of participants at the time of study. After adjusting for age of onset of initial disease and number of comorbidities, sex is a significant predictor of Barthel score (p=0.001). In addition, when segregated by gender, the average Barthel score for male centenarians is 74.4 (95% CI 69.0, 79.7) and the average for females is 63.2 (95% CI, 59.96, 66.5) which is significantly different (p=0.0009). While there are far fewer of them, male Centenarians have a higher functional index than their female counterparts. Trends in functional decline seem to be unique for the two sexes.