How longevity is inherited
You can inherit longevity only from centenarians
At the same time, the chances of living longer grow with each additional long-lived relative
Polina Loseva, "The Attic"
The genes that determine life expectancy, scientists have not yet been able to find. While they are arguing about whether longevity is inherited, an international group of scientists collected a sample of more than 20,000 families and offered their own answer to this question. According to their calculations, only 10% of the longest-lived people reliably transmit a tendency to a long life to their children. It does not depend on gender or any social factors, but it is summed up when inherited from different relatives.
There are as many studies devoted to the genetics of longevity as there are answers to the question of whether life expectancy is inherited. Depending on the population under study and the calculation methods, scientists' optimism can vary greatly. For example, observations of modern centenarians-Italians and their children say rather that there is inheritance. And the processing of genealogical trees of past centuries indicates rather the opposite. In some studies, the assessment of heritability reaches as much as 25% (that is, scientists propose to explain the final life expectancy of about every fourth person by genetic factors), but recently it was lowered to only 7%. And we don't know anything at all about the genes that determine life expectancy: there are several candidates for their role (for example, the AROE gene, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease), but there are no unambiguous patterns.
A group of researchers from the Netherlands, Germany and the USA conducted their heritability calculations. They used two independent databases: one from the US state of Utah (Utah Population Database), the other from Holland (LINKing System for historical family reconstruction). In each database, they searched for complete families of three generations so that correlations could be calculated between the life length of a second-generation person, his parents and his children. They published the results of their calculations in the journal Nature Communications (Niels van den Berg et al., Longevity defined as top 10% survivors and beyond is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait). It turned out that the life expectancy of parents and children is generally correlated, but not in all families. Unambiguous dependence can be found only for the top 10-15% of centenarians (that is, 10% of the longest-living people in the population): their children's chances of living longer grow to 30%. In short-lived people, there is practically no relationship with the life expectancy of their parents. This can be a reconciliation of the dispute about the heritability of longevity: yes, it is inherited; no, not everyone. Apparently, it is these long-lived 10% of people who provide the same genetic component of life expectancy, which is then lowered, then increased depending on the study.
In addition, new calculations confirm that the genetic factor in longevity is really involved. It turned out that the more chances a child has to live longer, the more long-lived relatives he has, including parents, their brothers and sisters. That is, the long life of relatives is, as it were, summed up in the offspring. If long life were determined only by external factors, such as health or well-being, then it would hardly depend on the number of successful relatives. In addition, the patterns turned out to be the same in both databases, in Utah and Holland, although living conditions, financial well-being and average life expectancy in these regions are different.
But in the new study, the inheritance of longevity was in no way related to gender. This suggests that the genes responsible for life expectancy are located in autosomes (non-sex chromosomes). However, it is still unclear how to reconcile these data with recent studies on male chromosomes that shorten the life of mice.
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