The Key to Live Longer is Not Genetics, but Your Spouse

Fahad Mulyana . November 07, 2018
Teknologi.id - People actually do not have long lives because of genetics. An analysis by researchers studying the family trees of more than 400 million people just proved this theory wrong. Research and development company Calico Life Sciences had collaborated with the world's largest online family history resource Ancestry to conduct this research. They discovered that our long lives are dependant on the type of spouses we pick.
The study, which was published in Genetics Society of America's journal, GENETICS, had studied set of pedigrees from the 400 million people were largely Americans of European ancestry from the online ancestry resource. "Partnering with Ancestry allowed this new study to gain deeper insights by using a much larger data set than any previous studies of longevity," Chief Scientific Officer Catherine Ball says. Incase you're worried if your personal data from the website had been compromised for this research, relax. Only the year of birth, year of death and place of birth were shared from Ancestry's 54 million subscriber-generated public family trees representing six billion ancestors.

Ancestry boasts 20 billion ancestral records from its over 54 million subscribers.
"We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be," says the study's lead author, Graham Ruby.
What is heritability ? It is a measure of trait variations. In this case it is measured through genetic differences. "It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask," Ruby adds. The research team then estimated the heritability from the family tree of a person by examining the similarity of life span between the individual's relatives. The team discovered that siblings-in-law and first-cousins-in-law had corresponding life spans. This is despite the individuals not being blood relatives. The researchers discovered this is largely due to assortive mating. "What assortative mating means here is that the factors that are important for life span tend to be very similar between mates," Ruby says. The research learned that people selected partners with similar traits of their own. And this also includes life span. This is where other characteristics come in to determine it. Stuff such as wealth and height comes into consideration when we're talking in the context of longevity. The research points out that this is why the wealthy generally marry other wealthy folks which leads to the lengthening of their lives. It all kinda makes sense now.. (DWK)
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