Hope to Live to 100? Check Your Genes

 This past March a study finds that besides healthy eating and exercise to live to a respectable old age, making it to the age of 95 or 100, it may require help from your DNA. Especially for the people approaching or exceeding the one-century mark, Dr. Thomas Perls of Boston University stated, “Genetic makeup explains an increasingly greater portion of the variation in how old people live to be.” During the study, a team which was led by professor Paola Sebastiani looked at thousands of sibling groups in New England where at least one person reached the age of 90. The study found that for the people who lived to the age of 90, the chances that their siblings would also reach the age of 90 was only 70 percent higher than for the average person born within or around that same time. Although, as the number of birthdays came and went, genetics began to play a much bigger role. People who lived to be the age of 95 had siblings with 3.5 times higher than normal chance of also reaching the age of 95. People who lived to be the age of 100 had siblings with 9 times higher chance of also living to be the age of 100. The few people who lived to be the age of 105 had siblings with a extremely high 35 times higher chance of also living to be the age of 105. But according to the team of researchers, reaching to the age 105 is about 1,000 times rarer than making it to the age of 95.

Overall, the findings of the study supports the theory of which genes play “a stronger and stronger role in living to these more and more extreme ages,” stated the researchers involved. These researchers also believe that these combinations of longevity-linked genes that help people survive to the age of 95 might be different than the genes that help people reach the age of 105.

Based upon studies of twins’ in the 1980s and early 90s, scholars have maintained that twenty to thirty percent of longevity is due to the differences in genes. The remainder is due to the differences in environment, health related behaviors, and or chance events. Perls did point out that “the oldest twins in those studies only lived to their mid to late 80s,” that meaning, only studies like the one here that can help the scientists understand why people can live to such extreme ages.

In all, research that focuses on these particularly old individuals is in fact a lot more powerful in discovering longevity related genes than studies of people in their 90s, given that it appears that genetics begin to play a much larger role in helping people live past the ages of 100 or 105.

Original Article