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People who live past 105 years old have genes that stop DNA damage
- andrewtbham 6y agoanother source without paywall. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210504112619.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210504112619.h...
- flobosg 6y agoThe journal’s press release: https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/53c636fb/do-people-aged-105-and-over-live-longer-because-they-have-more-efficient-dna-repair https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/53c636fb/do-people-a... The actual paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/57849 https://elifesciences.org/articles/57849
- kingsuper20 6y agoThat's actually interesting. You have to wonder what low-hanging fruit is coming up by combining mass sequencing with medical (and other) history.
- babesh 6y agoI wonder whether some group will start some gene therapy based on this research.
- azinman2 6y agoI’d love this to be incorporated into 23andme and the like. Would change one’s approach to retirement and savings if you knew how long you needed money for…
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- grishka 5y agoAs someone 99% confident that we're on the verge of discovering a way of reversing aging, it makes me incredibly sad, almost angry, to realize that many people are literally planning how they'll die.
- SvenMarquardt 5y agoIf we can reverse ageing, your entire life will be spent planning how to avoid existential risks. When you can live forever even crossing the road becomes too risky.
- ben_w 5y agoNot necessarily, because people do plenty of risky activities today which shorten their life expectancies.
- crimson_chin 5y agoIs that new? Humans have always planned how they die, and how it will affect those around them. Isn't that the point of a will, for instance?
- grishka 5y agoIdk, I just don't understand the meaning of a life that has an end, and thus "leaving something behind" makes no sense to me. Why leave something behind if the moment a person dies the entire universe ceases to exist for them?
- pizza 5y agoThere are things worse than dying, similarly, there are things that are better than what can be experienced
- jlokier 5y agoIt makes sense if you believe other people exist in a meaningful way similar to your own conscious existence. When you die, the universe doesn't cease to exist for them. So you are not leaving things behind for your own benefit. It's for other people. Conversely, if you believe the universe ceases to exist entirely when you die, you believe other people cease to exist too. In this case, perhaps the only consistent way to think of other people is that they are not like you when you are alive either. From a more down to Earth perspective, if I left the planet on a one-way interstellar FTL journey, confident I would never return and that there was no way to communicate with the people I left behind, even though it would be a relief in some ways and I'd stop caring about people left behind, I'd still want to arrange good things for some of them after my departure. Because I'm nice like that.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoWhy would knowing you are great at DNA repair guard against other things befalling and endangering the elderly, and very mundane, like falling and breaking a bone, increasingly hard to heal the older one is, and thus at times a gateway to further injury cascade?
- azinman2 5y agoThere are many ways one can die or be injured. But knowing the likely upper limit of your longevity can change how you approach finances and risk.
- virtue3 5y agoI find it good to remember that genes are like re-used variables that do 100s of things in a giant 1mil lines of code file. Just cuz they identified one gene doesn't mean that it doesn't require other activations as well. Or that expressing that one gene will have that much of an effect. So sure, you could have an idea of the upper limit but definitely not the whole story. Circulating levels of GH/Insulin/IGF and other hormone like chemicals also play a huge factor in longevity as well. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22396862/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22396862/
- londons_explore 5y agoSo far, I suspect such genetic analysis has too much uncertainty to use as individual guidance. Knowing that an average person has say an 85% chance to exceed age 70, but you only have a 68% chance, would you dramatically change your life choices?
- azinman2 5y agoIn this case it’s not about that, but rather if you possess what it takes to hit 100+.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI look at my dad, and grandfathers deaths, and pray. As to retirement---I just hope jobs that are easy on the body, and don't require much thought are still around in a few years. I figure the only thing that might give me a few more years them is I wasen't a huge smoker. Although, they all had easier financial lives than myself which puts me in the early death catagory?
- o-__-o 5y agoNo one makes it out alive
- andrewjl 5y agoWithout knowing your entire genome (23andme looks at markers and not much else) it's going to be hard to give an accurate answer to that sort of question. And that's aside from non-genetic risks of death that the other commenters have already pointed out.
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- robwwilliams 5y agoYes, and genomes only a small but significant part of the longevity puzzle.
- andrewjl 5y agoIndeed, hence the nature vs nurture debate. The environment and how it indirectly interacts with the genome is just as big of a factor.
- ryukafalz 5y ago> I’d love this to be incorporated into 23andme and the like. Watch out - your insurance company would probably love that too, if they can get their hands on the data.
- Scoundreller 5y agoI mean, it would help my government better plan health care resources and where they're needed. "Ok, this region over here is going to have a lot of cancers, build a treatment clinic there".
- robwwilliams 5y agoYou mean like everything governments know about smoking, drug use disorders, poor diet, exposure to environmental toxicants, and how they have used that information with marvelous efficiency? Yep.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI used to get those reports when 23andme started. They are not allowed to give them for 10+ years now. I m not in the US - we have universal healthcare. Disallowing me to have those reports is almost violating my rights
- elliekelly 5y agoI’m not sure if it’s still an option but when 23andme first started getting looked at by regulators and shut off the health reporting they allowed you to download all of your raw data. I wish I could remember the name of it but there was a GitHub repo (I think written in Python?) that you could run against your raw data and it would spit out the health results that 23andme withheld.
- casefields 5y agohttps://www.promethease.com/ https://www.promethease.com/
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- robwwilliams 5y agoI have not read the original paper yet, but I can tell you that longevity is not controlled by any one process. Its complicated. Simple stories are simply wrong. That complexity is amplified by environmental factors and intense gene-by-environmental non-linearities. We have to live with this reality until we die ;-)
- fy20 5y ago> Would change one’s approach to retirement and savings if you knew how long you needed money for… Popular wisdom amongst early retirement groups is you need 25x your annual spending to retire indefinitely. This figure is based on average stock market returns, so as long as you take out less than you earn each year you are golden. Some years it won't do so well, others it'll do better, but overall you should be safe. https://www.madfientist.com/safe-withdrawal-rate/ https://www.madfientist.com/safe-withdrawal-rate/
- vidarh 5y agoYes, but that is based on not knowing how long you'll live, which means you can't risk eating much into your capital. But if you somehow could know exactly how long you'll live, it could be adjusted accordingly, and especially as you get closer. E.g. to take an extreme example: If you know you only have 10 years left, then obviously you could just keep your money as cash to avoid market risks, and spend 10% each of your remaining years. Even if it's not 100% certain, if you were able to get a very precise estimate, there'd be room for a lot better annuity rates on offer for people with a shorter life expectancy.
- reasonattlm 5y agoWe should treat this study and the discussion of the relevance of the results as being highly speculative. Firstly, near all genetic variants that have been found to correlate with age in one study population fail to replicate in other study populations, and this is true of studies with cohorts consisting of thousands of individuals. The study here used a primary cohort of less than 100 individuals over the age of 100. This is ever the challenge in research focused on extreme old age: very few people make it that far. There was a secondary validation cohort of a few hundred centenarians, but I'm not sure that should increase our confidence in the data, given the existence of other studies that did much the same thing and still failed to replicate. Secondly, given the identification of a genetic variant, near everything one can say about it is quite speculative in advance of much more detailed research into how exactly that variant changes cell behavior. Lastly, the most robust data established to date on the contributions of genetic variants to human longevity, with studies pulling from very large national databases such as the UK Biobank, suggests that genetics has only a minor role to play. Lifestyle choices and exposure to pathogens are the dominant factors. In the case of long-lived families, cultural transmission of lifestyle choices relating to longevity seems a more plausible explanation than genetics, given the rest of the literature as it presently stands.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoBingo. Not sure why every biology/medicine post on HN is unquestioningly upvoted and accepted as established fact by so many commenters, who always discuss the applications instead of the validity. I wish this community of all would know better.
- Aardwolf 5y agoAre the SNP's of this known?
- zmmmmm 5y agoFrom what I can see the analysis was not highly significant for the individual SNPs (p>0.1) but they combined it into a gene based analysis that brought the significance up. I'm not enough of a statistician to know how valid that procedure is but I would say even if you find out the individual SNPs it probably isn't too reliable to interpret them on their own.
- medymed 5y agoSomewhat related to this, elephants have around 20 copies of TP53, the master ‘protector of the genome’ gene that senses DNA damage and reacts to it. With lots of cells you need lots of protection against cancer. I wonder if blue whales have more. Response to somatic mutation is the name of the game for organisms with very old or very many cells.
- londons_explore 5y agoSome human cells, notably within the immune system must mutate to function. If they do not mutate, you will die as bacteria and viruses mutate faster than your defences can adapt.
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- sxv 5y agoThis sounds interesting, do you have any references for further reading?
- londons_explore 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_hypermutation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_hypermutation Treatments that reduce mutations in general could make the immune system less effective (increasing your chances of dying of disease, and that of passing a disease on to others). It could also cause fewer mutations in your offspring, which might hurt human evolution over many hundreds of generations. Curing cancer tomorrow, but with side effects of dramatically increasing transmission and deaths by transmissible disease, and causing humans to die out from failure to adapt to future environments seems like overall a bad plan. It's certainly something we'll need to fully understand before making use of.
- robwwilliams 5y agoNot right. Get some hard core background in population genetics. If you want a great (but costly) text on this topic with real insight—, then read Lynch’s The Origins of Genome Architecture.
- zmmmmm 5y agoUnderlying SNP data, if anybody wants to play with it: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Whole-genome_sequencing_of_semi-supercentenarians/12367085/1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Whole-genome_sequencin...
- throwaway481048 5y agoThis reminds me of the US military vet that passed a few years ago at over 110 years old, with a life full of indulging in whiskey and cigars. His name is Richard Overton. [1] It is clear how an individual may come to believe that this man’s genes were/are quantifiably better than others in these regards, due to how his body responded to - and managed - his long term intake of alcohol and tobacco, including the unspoken harmful ingredients. Thought for the future: What follows the comprehensive identification of ideal traits and their genetic code..? Will “designer babies” become a new normal..? [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/28/richard-overton-dies-at-the-age-of-112.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/28/richard-overton-dies-at-the-...
- undersuit 5y agoThere was an story in Stephen Baxter's "Vacuum Diagrams" about a eugenics experiment where the participants could only reproduce at like 40 years, then 50, then 60, etc. The leader was trying to suppress the genes that prevented long life. They probably did some nasty stuff to preserve the experiment, but it's not as bad as just killing all the babies that don't meet the standard of some puritanical leader.