Re: What is old age for?

Mike Stanton wrote on insurance evidence for a genetic component to
longevity:

"Maybe. There is always the possibility that because social mobility
was so much less for previous generations, the environmental factors
that affected your grandparents' life span also operated on your
parents. Do they operate for you? "

------------

I don't see such a clear cut opposition between social and genetic
environments, since they are mutually shaping. But we can examine the
matter more closely.

For example, would both sets of your grandparents had similar
environments?

Insurance companies always also ask about environmental factors as well
- e.g., do you smoke? Do you engage in activities like hang-gliding?
etc. So they are not using your parents and grandparents ages as proxy
measurements for environments.

But there is independent evidence for genes affecting longevity,
ranging from twin studies in humans to more interventionist studies
with other animals.

For example, here is an abstract from

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15660509&dopt=Citation

"Genetics of longevity and aging.

Vijg J, Suh Y.

University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas 78245,
USA. vijg@xxxxxxxxxxx

Longevity, i.e., the property of being long-lived, has its natural
limitation in the aging process. Longevity has a strong genetic
component, as has become apparent from studies with a variety of
organisms, from yeast to humans. Genetic screening efforts with
invertebrates have unraveled multiple genetic pathways that suggest
longevity is promoted through the manipulation of metabolism and the
resistance to oxidative stress. To some extent, these same mechanisms
appear to act in mammals also, despite considerable divergence during
evolution. Thus far, evidence from population-based studies with humans
suggests the importance of genes involved in cardiovascular disease as
important determinants of longevity. The challenge is to test if the
candidate longevity genes that have emerged from studies with model
organisms exhibit genetic variation for life span in human populations.
Future investigations are likely to involve large-scale case-control
studies, in which large numbers of genes, corresponding to entire gene
functional modules, will be assessed for all possible sequence
variation and associated with detailed phenotypic information on each
individual over extended periods of time. This should eventually
unravel the genetic factors that contribute to each particular aging
phenotype."


Lance

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Relevant Pages

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