2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Russian researchers found that the risk of getting age-related chronic diseases in old age increases at about the same rate as the risk of death - it doubles every eight years after 40. In addition, the authors of the study, published in the journal Communications Biology, found 12 DNA regions associated with a life expectancy without chronic age-related diseases.
Finding the upper bounds on longevity and longevity genes is a hot area in biology (news about research in this area can be read, for example, here and here). Many studies are based on the study of deep centenarians, but this approach has several disadvantages. Firstly, there are not very many people who have lived to an outstanding age, and therefore studies on them periodically sin with statistical errors or simply lack of data. Secondly, life expectancy itself does not directly say anything about its quality.
A group of scientists from MIPT and Gero, led by Yuri Aulchenko, used an alternative approach and analyzed the duration of not the entire life, but only the time before the onset of age-related diseases, the so-called healthy life expectancy. This allowed them to use a large pool of data, which included information on the genotypes and phenotypes of 300, 5 thousand British residents aged 37 to 73 years.
Analyzing the dynamics of the incidence of the most common diseases - the causes of death in older age, the researchers noticed that the likelihood of getting sick with them increases with age, as well as the chances of dying from any cause, doubling approximately every eight years. “This close relationship between the most common chronic diseases and mortality indicates that their risks may be regulated by the same process, namely aging. That is why healthy life expectancy can be used as a proxy to study the genetic factors that control the rate of aging,”says one of the leaders of the study, Petr Fedichev.
The figure shows the incidence of the most popular age-related diseases at different ages, including cancer, heart failure, diabetes and dementia. In addition, mortality (orange) and the overall chances of getting sick with age-related diseases (brown) are plotted on the graph.
Having estimated the healthy life expectancy for each individual, the researchers tracked the relationship of these numbers with individual characteristics, including both the presence of variants of individual genes in the genome and general information about human life. This search was crowned with success - both the expected general regulators of healthy life expectancy, such as smoking, a person's gender, obesity or education, were found, as well as genetic associations. 12 DNA regions with 328 variants of mutations were associated with the risk of getting sick earlier or later than their peers, some of which were already mentioned earlier in the literature and turned out to be indicators of diseases and overall life expectancy.
12 regions in the genome, located on the Manhattan graph above the red line, were associated with late or early development of age-related diseases
There are many human habits associated with slower aging or less risk of dying young. These include leading a healthy lifestyle, the formation of strong and numerous social bonds, stress resistance and others, which you can read about in our material.
