February 28, 2024 / 1:27 PM EST / CBS News
Caitlin O’Kane
Caitlin O’Kane is a New York City journalist who works on the CBS News social media team as a senior manager of content and production. She writes about a variety of topics and produces “The Uplift,” CBS News’ streaming show that focuses on good news.
An Oklahoma woman is turning 100 on a Leap Day – so it’s technically only her 25th birthday. Because Feb. 29 only comes every four years, Mary Lea Forsythe has only been able to celebrate on the actual day a handful of times over her long life.
She was honored by the Centenarians of Oklahoma ahead of her big day.
The nonprofit organization honors people who are 100 years old or older.
Forsythe, of Sand Springs, OK, sang in the chorus in high school and “loves all
things musical and plays the piano and mandolin,” according to the organization.
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“Mary Lea reminds us to all Read the Bible,” the organization said.
A birthday party was held for Forsythe by the daughters of the American Revolution
Osage Hills Chapter, where she was inducted as an Oklahoma centenarian. CBS News
has reached out to the DAR and Centenarians of Oklahoma for more information and
is awaiting a response.
The odds of being born on Leap Day
The odds of being born on Feb. 29 is about 1-in-1,461 and there are
only about 5 million people in the world born on this day, according to History.com.
In 2020, a New York mother made headlines for giving birth on Leap Day – for the second time. Lindsay Demchak’s first baby, Omri, was born on February 29, 2016. Her second baby, Scout, was born February 29, 2020. The last time parents welcomed back-to-back Leap Year babies was 1960, Nikki Battiste reported on “CBS Mornings.”
Their parents said they plan on celebrating their birthdays on different days
when it’s not a Leap Year and will have a big celebration for both of them every four years.
On the Leap Day when Scout was born, four other babies were born at the same hospital — including a pair of twins.
What is a Leap Year?
A year is 365 days, but technically it takes the Earth slightly longer to orbit around the sun.
The Earth takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds – or 365.2422 days – to fully orbit the sun, according to NASA. Those extra hours are eliminated from the calendar most years. But every four years, an extra day is added to February so the calendar and seasons don’t get out of sync. If this didn’t happen, the extra hours would add up over time and seasons would start to skew.
“For example, say that July is a warm, summer month where you live. If we never had leap years, all those missing hours would add up into days, weeks and even months,” according to NASA. “Eventually, in a few hundred years, July will actually take place in the cold winter months!”
When is the next Leap Year?
The addition of February 29, known as a Leap Day,
to the 2024 calendar signifies we are in a Leap Year. There are Leap Days every four years.
The next Leap Year Days are Tuesday, Feb. 29, 2028; Sunday, Feb. 29, 2032, and Friday, Feb. 29, 2036.
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Oklahoma woman born on Leap Day celebrates 25th birthday, turns 100 years old.
A ‘blueprint’ for longevity:
Story by Adrianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY
New study has an answer for why some people live to be over 100.
Throughout history, brilliant minds have tried to figure out the secret behind living longer. Much of the research has credited diet and exercise, but a group of scientists expanded on previous data to suggest another theory.
Researchers from Boston University and Tufts Medical Center found people who live to be 100 years old or older – called centenarians – may have a unique composition of immune cells that’s highly protective against illnesses, according to a study published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Lancet eBiomedicine.
“Our data support the hypothesis that centenarians have protective factors that enable (them) to recover from disease and reach extreme old ages,” said lead author Tanya Karagiannis, a senior bioinformatician at the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science, and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center.
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People with normal immune systems are exposed to infections, recover from them, and learn to adapt to future infections. While the immune system’s ability to respond to infections declines with age, scientists hypothesized this may be different for centenarians.
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Researchers analyzed immune cells circulating in the blood taken from seven centenarian participants in North America and identified immune-specific patterns of aging and extreme human longevity.
They compared this information with other publicly available data that looked at immune cells from people ranging across the human lifespan and found centenarians’ immune profile did not follow trends associated with natural aging.
The findings “provide support to the hypothesis that centenarians are enriched with protective factors that increase their ability to recover from infections,” said senior author Paola Sebastiani, director of the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science, and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center.
It’s unclear if this unique immunological ability is genetic, naturally occurring, or a confluence of outside factors, said senior author Stefano Monti, associate professor of medicine, biostatistics, and bioinformatics at Boston University’s school of medicine.
“The answer to what makes you live longer is a very complex one,” he said. “There’s multiple factors, there’s the genetics – what you inherit from a parent, there’s lifestyle, there’s luck.” 4 things a doctor who’s written best-selling books about aging does daily in the hope of living longer (msn.com)
Study authors hope the report’s findings build on
existing research that could help develop therapeutics for the world’s aging population.
“Centenarians, and their exceptional longevity, provide a ‘blueprint’ for how we might
live more productive, healthful lives,” said senior author George J. Murphy, associate professor of medicine at Boston University’s school of medicine.
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Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare.
The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
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