Longevity: Lifestyle or genes? That’s our topic today. Did you know that the Greenland shark can live to be 400 years old? Or that some mayfly species survive for only 5 minutes? Today we turn to the role genetics play in determining life expectancy. Our question today: What are the relative contributions of lifestyle and genetics in determining our life expectancy?
World’s oldest human?
We begin our exploration of longevity in 1997. Jeanne Calment of France finds her way to fame by simply being: She manages to avoid death for 122 years, five months, and fourteen days. Or did she?
Nikolay Zak of the Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education offers that Calment died at age 59 in 1934. Zak explains that her daughter Yvonne assumes her identity after the fact to avoid inheritance taxes. If the story (based on circumstantial evidence) is true, the daughter did demonstrate considerable longevity, living to age 99.
Is our longevity encoded in our genes, or does our lifestyle determine it? While the answer is undoubtedly both, how much of longevity is secondary to your inherited DNA? The good folks at MD Linx recently asked 11 experts in aging, biology, and genetics to offer their insights. I will share some highlights with you.
First, the researchers interpreted the question in two ways: 1) Is human life length (compared to other species) primarily determined by genetics? 2) Is the longevity of some individual humans (compared to other humans) determined by genetics?
Professor David Gems, an expert in aging from University College London, offers that the upper limits of human longevity are primarily determined by genetics, with near certainty. He adds that the maximum lifespan of humans is about double that of our closest relatives among the higher primates, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
Longevity tends to run in families. Professor Dame Janet Thornton, an expert in anti-aging and cell biology and previous director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, believes that “genetics accounts for less than 30% of the effect — even as we recognize that some families have many very old people.”
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