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Gene pattern predicts who live the longest

Great grandmother in a garden setting

The gene patterns predicted with 77% accuracy who would be in the extreme old-age group (Source: Anna Ceglinska/iStockphoto)

Researchers have found a pattern of genes that predicts with more accuracy than ever before who might live to be 100 or older.

Their findings, published in the journal Science, offer the tantalising possibility of predicting who might hope for a longer life. They also cast doubt on the accuracy of tests being marketed now that offer to predict a person's risk of chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Several teams of researchers have identified gene patterns linked with extreme old age. But the researchers led by Paola Sebastiani and Dr Thomas Perls at Boston University say theirs provides the best accuracy yet.

They studied more than 1000 people who lived to be 100 or more and matched them to 1200 other people to identify the genetic patterns more common in the 100-year-olds using an approach called a genome-wide association study.

To their surprise, the longest-lived people had many of the same genes linked with diseases as everyone else. Their old-age genes appeared to cancel out the effects of the disease genes.

"A lot of people might ask: 'Well who would want to live to 100?' because they think [centenarians] have every age-related disease under the sun, are on death's doorstep, and certainly have Alzheimer's, but this isn't true," says Perls.

"We have noted in previous work that 90% of centenarians are disability-free at the average age of 93. We had long hypothesised that to get to 100 you have to have a relative lack of disease-associated variants. But in this case, we're finding that not to be the case."

No free passes

They identified 19 patterns among about 150 genes and said these patterns predicted with 77% accuracy who would be in the extreme old-age group.

"Some signatures correlate with the longest survival, other signatures correlate with the most delayed age of onset of age-related diseases such as dementia or cardiovascular disease or hypertension," says Sebastiani.

The researchers stressed that having these genes is unlikely to give a person a free pass to smoke, drink and overeat.

Sebastiani says Seventh Day Adventists have an average life expectancy of 88, eight years more than their average US contemporaries.

"They get there by virtue of the fact that they have a religion that asks them to be vegetarian, they regularly exercise, they don't drink alcohol, they tend to manage their stress well through religion and time with family and they don't smoke," she says. "It really does speak to the incredible importance of lifestyle factors."

The Boston researchers say they do not plan to market a test for the long-life genes and are working to design a free website where people who have had their DNA sequenced can check to see if they have any of them.

"The methodology that we developed can be applied to other complex genetic traits, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, cardiovascular disease and diabetes," says Sebastiani.

Currently about 1 in 6000 people live to be 100 and 1 in 7 million makes it to 110. The researchers say beliefs that certain populations in places such as Russia or Azerbaijan are more likely to have centenarians have been shown to be untrue.

Perls says he does not see the findings leading to youth elixirs, but hopes they may be used to help delay the start of age-related diseases like Alzheimer's.

Tags: health, older-people, genetics