Heredity, education and longevity

Geneticists promised the educated a long life

Oleg Lischuk, N+1

An international team of scientists has found that a genetic predisposition to a high level of education is associated with an increase in life expectancy. The results of the work are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Marioni et al., Genetic variants linked to education predict longevity).

A number of studies have shown that people with a higher level of education are healthier on average, have a higher income, move up the social ladder better and live longer. Since education depends on many personal and social characteristics, it is very difficult to identify specific mechanisms of its influence on these factors. At the same time, the level of education has a clear genetic predisposition: its heritability is estimated at 60 percent or more in family (when analyzing the success of twins) and 20-30 percent in molecular genetic (when investigating the relationship of a trait with gene polymorphisms) studies. Genome-wide association analyses revealed several genetic variants closely related to educational indicators.

The staff of the University of Edinburgh with colleagues from the UK, the Netherlands and Estonia conducted a search for these variants in the data of three large genetic cohort studies: Generation Scotland (about 17 thousand people), UK Biobank (about 115 thousand people) and Estonian Biobank (about six thousand people). In particular, scientists were interested in the correlation between the quantitative polygenic profile of participants associated with the level of education ("polygenic score") and the life expectancy of their deceased parents or the age of the living.

A meta-analysis of the data showed that an increase in the "polygenic score" of children by one standard deviation is associated with a decrease in the overall risk of death by 2.7 percent in mothers and 2.4 percent in fathers. When the children were divided according to the "polygenic score" into three equal groups, it turned out that the group with the highest indicators of parents live on average 0.55 years longer than the group with the lowest.

The results obtained show that the genetic contribution to the level of education can serve to predict life expectancy in epidemiological and other population studies. However, they represent only a statistical dependence, and not a cause-and-effect relationship, the authors emphasize.

Previous studies have shown that reading books in old age is associated with an increase in life expectancy, and eating animal protein is associated with a decrease in it. In addition, scientists have found that women with fewer children live longer, and that the life expectancy of the richest people is on average almost 15 years longer than the poorest. According to the findings of the staff of the Albert Einstein New York Medical College, such correlations work only up to a certain age, since, according to their data, the duration of human life has natural limitations and in general cannot exceed about 115 years.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 02.11.2016