Why do some people live to be very old while others don't even come close to their expected lifespan despite having similar lifestyles?

Thomas Cayne

 · 

Follow

Writer, painter, thinker, madman. 11h

Why do some people live to be very old while others don't even come close to their expected lifespan despite having similar lifestyles?

Kris and Nat are an example.

Roughly the same age (Kris is three years older), they share the very same interests in life — centered around sports, watching movies, traveling with the kids, and having a good time with friends. All of these friends share the same interests, in fact: all of them are prolific competitive sports(wo)men, all of them take great care of their diet and general health, all of them need to excel physically.

Excellence (and obsession) is what defines them.

In Kris and Nat’s case — who happened to be married (both the second the time around) — the similarity is even greater: they have the same diet, do the exact same sports, and both are martial arts instructors in the same dojo. They are nicknamed “the skeleton twins” by their friends.

The running joke is that they would be identical twins, if it wasn’t for the fact that they look so different and do not have the same gender, nor parents.

And despite all these similarities, Nat is diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer after she finds a futile bump. The re-occurring back pains which she attributed to her many physical activities are actually caused by breast cancer tumors on the spinal cord.

But even identical twins do not necessarily suffer simultaneously from the same cancers. In fact, one twin could die from cancer, while the other does not.

[1]

And the skeleton twins are no different.

Later it turns out that Nat was born with faulted tumor suppressing BRCA-genes, and that despite a life dedicated to martial arts, her own body isn’t capably of fighting off the tumors that have grown from within for almost a decade —

And shatter the skeleton twins not much later.

---

SOURCES: William Fairland, The body of a man lying down with the trunk dissected: two figures showing the lungs after breathing out (above) and after breathing in (below, simulated by inflating the lungs), from Francis Sibson, Medical Anatomy (London, John Churchill, 1869): Plate 17, 1866, colored lithograph. Wellcome Collection (no. 642390i). Digital image courtesy of Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

Footnotes

[1] 

Harvard study estimates cancer risk in twins | Harvard Magazine