Perls Wins Joseph T. Freeman Award
Honors longest-running study of centenarians
The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) has chosen Thomas T. Perls, professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, as the recipient of the 2016 Joseph T. Freeman Award, honoring his stewardship of the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). Housed at BU, the NECS is the longest-running and largest study of centenarians, their siblings, and their offspring in the world.
Perls’ study, which originated with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease, includes more than 500 semi-supercentenarians (ages 105 to 109 years) and 150 supercentenarians (ages 110 to 119 years). He is also the principal investigator of the National Institute on Aging–funded multi-center Long Life Family Study, a longitudinal study, established in 2006, of nearly 5,000 participants belonging to families demonstrating rare clustering for survival to extreme old age.
The honor, which is given annually to a prominent physician in the field of aging who is a member of the society’s Health Sciences section, will be awarded at the GSA’s Annual Scientific Meeting in November 2016 in New Orleans. The recipient traditionally presents a lecture at the next Annual Scientific Meeting, which will take place in July 2017 at the GSA-hosted World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics in San Francisco, California.
Perls sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, and he is a federal advisory board member for the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations of the US Census Bureau. He is also a vocal critic of the anti-aging industry, particularly its medical and legal misuse of growth hormone, testosterone, and other drugs for “anti-aging,” and has published extensively on the subject as well as testified before the US Congress. He is the author of two educational websites, the Living to 100 life expectancy calculator and www.hghwatch.com, which focuses on growth hormone use in anti-aging and sports.
Perls received his geriatrics training at both Mount Royal Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and Harvard Medical School, and earned his master’s degree in public health at Harvard. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians. Perls is also a senior physician in geriatrics and cares for patients at Boston Medical Center, the primary teaching hospital for the BU School of Medicine.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.