Engy › Who's who in longevity › Henne Holstege
At a glance
- Henne Holstege is a Dutch geneticist and associate professor in the Department of Clinical Genetics at Amsterdam UMC. She works at the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam and is affiliated with the Delft Bioinformatics Lab at Delft University of Technology.
- She leads the 100-plus Study, which since 2013 has followed cognitively healthy centenarians to understand why their brains keep working so well.
- A striking finding: some participants had clear signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains yet remained cognitively healthy. This points to protective factors or resilience.
- She also studied the blood of Dutch woman Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, who stayed mentally sharp until 115; by the end, her blood derived from only a few stem cells.
- She also searches for rare genetic variants that raise or lower the risk of Alzheimer’s.
- For longevity, her work shows that brain ageing does not inevitably lead to dementia.
- Takeaway: brain resilience is built partly through lifelong learning, exercise and social connection.
Recent
- Study APOE-stratified genome-wide association analyses provide insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimers's disease
- Study Parental longevity and polygenic longevity scores in relation to ageing-related factors in a population of 70-year-olds followed over six years: The Gothenburg H70 Birth Cohort Study