

Methuselah Genes Discovered - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703571704575341034212066208.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews

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reasonattlm
This isn't all that, because the genetics of longevity will have next to no
impact on the future of your own personal longevity.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/there-will-be-
ten...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/there-will-be-ten-thousand-
subtle-gene-variants-of-human-longevity.php)

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/another-
illustrat...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/another-illustration-
as-to-why-there-will-be-many-many-genetic-contributions-to-longevity.php)

We should expect to see subtle associations with human longevity in genes
associated with processes known to be important in long-term health - such as
the inflammatory response, or indeed anything else associated with the
operation of the immune system. But what can be done with this information? As
things stand, probably little of consequence. All new knowledge in the biology
of human aging will prove useful eventually, but in the near term it seems
very unlikely that as much benefit can be derived from such exploration and
analysis as from, say, effort put into developing repair technologies for the
known forms of age-related damage.

We humans have a lot of genes, which means there is a very, very large number
of potential interactions between gene variants - even within a subset of
genes associated with a specific biological system. Discovery and
understanding in the face of this complexity represents an enormous amount of
work, which is one of the reasons that researchers who favor the metabolic
manipulation approach to aging believe that we are a long way from any
significant slowing of aging or extension of the healthy human life span.

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scott_s
They come to the opposite conclusion of what I read several years ago. Live
Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just in Genes.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html>

Three pages of the article are behind a paywall, but I recall something it
said near the end. It was that when they crunched the numbers, of everything
they looked at, longevity was the _least_ correlated with heredity.

~~~
bd
I could see all 4 pages. Try clearing NYT cookies.

It seems the opposite conclusion may be just a difference in reporting.

Most of the 2006 article deals just with "normally" long lived people (80-90
years vs. their shorter living relatives).

About 100+ year olds they wrote:

" _A woman whose sister lived to be 100 has a 4 percent chance of living that
long, Dr. Christensen says. That is better than the 1 percent chance for women
in general, but still not very great because the absolute numbers, 1 out of
100 or 4 out of 100, are still so small. For men, the odds are much lower. A
man whose sister lived to be 100 has just a 0.4 percent chance of living that
long. In comparison, men in general have a 0.1 percent chance of reaching
100._ "

So even then, they found 4x higher relative chance for extreme longevity for
people with extremely long lived siblings.

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Groxx
From the quoted quip near the bottom:

    
    
      Life insurance premiums will never be the same again once this test is out there.
    

That means, for people who are more likely to live a long time, the recent-
and-upcoming health care shifts are _fantastic_ news. I remember reading about
some 100+ers who have had their support vanish because they lived too long,
and are now surviving wholly on donations. Some of them are quite active yet,
but they're almost totally incapable of getting a job because of their age.

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kuahyeow
I can't help but think there is a flaw here. Isn't this a bias in favor of
survivors? Without measuring the control group of people who have similar
genes but did not survive, it's not possible to conclude that genes ~>
longevity.

~~~
tansey
Didn't they do that? Otherwise the individuals would have a LOT more than a
few genetic traits in common.

Even if they did it though, the buzz-kill question still exists: are the
results statistically significant? Is there a link to the actual study?

