RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Two months away from what she says is her 120th birthday, Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, a great-grandmother from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is rushing to be recognized as the world’s oldest living person by the Guinness World Records.
The institution currently features another Brazilian, Inah Canabarro Lucas, a nun from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul as the oldest living person at 116 years, but Deolira’s family and doctors are confident that she will soon take the religious woman’s title.
“She is still not in the book, but she is the oldest in the world according to the documents we have on her, as I recently discovered,” said Deolira’s granddaughter Doroteia Ferreira da Silva, who is half her age.
The documents show that Pedro da Silva was born on March 10th 1905 in the rural area of Porciuncula, a small town in the state of Rio. She now lives in a colorfully painted house in Itaperuna, where her two granddaughters Doroteia, 60, and Lidia Ferreira da Silva, 64, take care of her.
The grandmother is also supervised by doctors and researchers who are interested in how she outlived the average life expectancy in Brazil, which currently sits at 76.4 years, by more than four decades.
“Mrs. Deolira, in 2025, will be 120 years old. She is in a good general state of health for her condition, she is not taking any medication,” said geriatric doctor Juair de Abreu Pereira, who checks up on Pedro da Silva frequently and is assisting her family in the process with Guinness World Records.
In a statement, Guinness said it couldn't confirm receiving Pedro da Silva's application, because it receives many from people around the world who claim to be the oldest living person.
Major floods in the region almost twenty years ago destroyed most of Deolira’s original documents, her doctor said. That may pose a challenge for the official recognition of her age.
Even if her age is not precise, Pedro da Silva is certainly older than 100 years, according to Mateus Vidigal, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo who has studied her case as part of a project to understand the super elderly population of Brazil.
“Mrs. Deolira has not been excluded from the study, but there is this fragility which is the lack of documentation that is approved by those organizations,” Vidigal said, referring to vetting institutions such as the Guinness World Records.
Pedro Silva’s healthy diet and sleeping habits are key to her longevity, according to Dr. Pereira. To this day, she has a good interaction with her family and likes eating bananas.
“I wish I could get to her age and be like that,” Ferreira da Silva, her granddaughter, said. “While we have high blood pressure and diabetes, she does not have any of that.”
(Reporting by Renato Spyrro in Rio de Janeiro and Isabel Teles in Sao Paulo, writing by Isabel Teles, editing by Manuela Andreoni and Diane Craft)
