"Longevity gene": shelf life – 99 years
"Good" genes do not help to live up to a hundred years, scientists have found
Variations in the "longevity gene" affect a person's life expectancy only up to the ninth decade of life, and the chances of living to 100 or more years do not actually depend on them, according to an article published in the Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences (Effects of FOXO3 Polymorphisms on Survival to Extreme Longevity in Four Centenarian Studies).
"Variations in the FOXO3 gene affect a person's life expectancy, but they are not as strongly associated with an exceptionally long life as we previously thought. "Good" versions of this gene help to live to a certain age, 90-95 years, but do not increase the chances of their owners to live to a hundred," says Harold Bae from the University of Oregon in Corvallis (in a press release, New findings suggest a genetic influence on aging into the 90s but not beyond – VM).
Today, geneticists and biologists are actively interested in how long a person can live in principle, whether there is a limit to life expectancy and which mutations in genes control how long a person lives. To study all these secrets, researchers analyze the DNA and diet of residents of certain regions of Italy and Japan, where a record number of people who have lived to 100 years live, and transplant their genes into yeast DNA.
In recent years, scientists have managed to discover several hundred similar variations in genes that affect human life expectancy, the contribution of each of which to longevity is relatively small, and the mechanism of action is almost unexplored. Baye and his colleagues found that the influence of some of these genes on longevity is greatly overestimated by studying the DNA structure of eight thousand of the oldest inhabitants of the Earth.
Scientists were interested in which version of the FOXO3 gene, one of the supposedly strongest factors of longevity, long-livers from Italy and the USA, as well as Ashkenazi Jews, have, and how it can affect their life expectancy.
This study showed that variations in FOXO3 are indeed associated with longevity, but in a rather limited form – "good" versions of this gene help men to live up to 96 years, and women – up to 99 years, but cease to affect life expectancy when crossing this border.
"We have often heard from colleagues and read articles that FOXO3 is directly related to longevity, but our verification showed that such a connection does not exist for people who have lived for more than a hundred years. We believe that colleagues received similar results for the reason that they only followed people aged 80-90 years, and not the oldest inhabitants of the planet," concludes Thomas Peris, one of the authors of the article from Boston University (USA).
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20.07.2017