Research interests Healthy aging Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia Centenarians Resilience against cognitive decline Resistance against cognitive decline Genetics Genetics of Neurodegenerative Disease 100-plus Study Reaching extreme ages with maintained cognitive function runs in families, suggesting that the genome is involved. To investigate the ‘protective genome’ and derivative cellular constellations, we have set upt the 100-plus Study (www.100plus.nl), a longitudinal cohort study of cognitively healthy centenarians. Currently the cohort includes >400 centenarians from whom we collect brain tissues, blood samples, DNA samples, and feces samples. This cohort has thus far provided a wealth of new insights into how these individuals maintained their cognitive health: we observed an enrichment of protective genetic elements, which may underlie the resistance or resilience against accumulation of specific neuropathological substrates we observed in their brains.