Noteworthy data is emerging to support the existence of longevity-enabling genes. Our observations of the relationship between reproductive fitness and longevity among centenarians support theories that posit strong selective forces in the determination of how fast humans age and their susceptibility to diseases associated with ageing. Current data support the idea that there is no selective advantage for humans to have a lifespan of approximately 100 years. Rather, getting to such a very old age may be a by-product of longevity-enabling genes that maximize the length of time during which women can bear children, and during which they can increase the survival probabilities of their children and grandchildren. We thus review the literature pertaining to the relationship between reproductive fitness and longevity.
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Longevity phenotype in humans results from the influence of environmental and genetic factors. Few gene polymorphisms have been identified so far with a modest effect on lifespan leaving room for the search of other players in the longevity game. It has been recently demonstrated that targeted disruption of the mouse homolog of the human angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) gene (AGTR1) translates into marked prolongation of animal lifespan (Benigni et al.
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Department of Biostatistics, Boston University School of Public Health Boston, MA, USA.
Supercentenarians (age 110+ years old) generally delay or escape age-related diseases and disability well beyond the age of 100 and this exceptional survival is likely to be influenced by a genetic predisposition that includes both common and rare genetic variants. In this report, we describe the complete genomic sequences of male and female supercentenarians, both age >114 years old. We show that: (1) the sequence variant spectrum of these two individuals' DNA sequences is largely comparable to existing non-supercentenarian genomes; (2) the two individuals do not appear to carry most of the well-established human longevity enabling variants already reported in the literature; (3) they have a comparable number of known disease-associated variants relative to most human genomes sequenced to-date; (4) approximately 1% of the variants these individuals possess are novel and may point to new genes involved in exceptional longevity; and (5) both individuals are enriched for coding variants near longevity-associated variants that we discovered through a large genome-wide association study.
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Nonagenarians and centenarians represent a quickly growing age group worldwide. In parallel, the prevalence of dementia increases substantially, but how to define dementia in this oldest-old age segment remains unclear. Although the idea that the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) decreases after age 90 has now been questioned, the oldest-old still represent a population relatively resistant to degenerative brain processes.
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Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany.
Human longevity is heritable with a genetic component of 25-32%. Variation in genes regulating the levels of somatic maintenance and DNA repair functions is thought to modulate the aging process and to contribute to survival at advanced age. We tested 92 non-synonymous SNPs in 49 DNA repair genes for a possible association with longevity in a sample of 395 German centenarians and 411 controls.
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Clinical Analysis Laboratory Dr. Echevarne, Unit of Molecular Genetics, Barcelona, Spain.
For the best understanding of aging, we must consider a genetic pool in which genes with negative effects (deleterious genes that shorten the life span) interact with genes with positive effects (helpful genes that promote longevity) in a constant epistatic relationship that results in a modulation of the final expression under particular environmental influences. Examples of deleterious genes affecting aging (predisposition to early-life pathology and disease) are those that confer risk for developing vascular disease in the heart, brain, or peripheral vessels (APOE, ACE, MTFHR, and mutation at factor II and factor V genes), a gene associated with sporadic late-onset Alzheimer's disease (APOE E4), a polymorphism (COLIA1 Sp1) associated with an increased fracture risk, and several genetic polymorphisms involved in hormonal metabolism that affect adverse reactions to estrogen replacement in postmenopausal women. In summary, the process of aging can be regarded as a multifactorial trait that results from an interaction between stochastic events and sets of epistatic alleles that have pleiotropic age-dependent effects.
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