2016-11-22
Genetic variants linked to education predict longevity
Publication
Publication
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , Volume 113 - Issue 47 p. 13366- 13371
Educational attainment is associated with many health outcomes, including longevity. It is also known to be substantially heritable. Here, we used data from three large genetic epidemiology cohort studies (Generation Scotland, n = ∼17,000; UK Biobank, n = ∼115,000; and the Estonian Biobank, n = ∼6,000) to test whether education-linked genetic variants can predict lifespan length. We did so by using cohort members' polygenic profile score for education to predict their parents' longevity. Across the three cohorts, meta-analysis showed that a 1 SD higher polygenic education score was associated with ∼2.7% lower mortality risk for both mothers (total ndeaths = 79,702) and ∼2.4% lower risk for fathers (total ndeaths = 97,630). On average, the parents of offspring in the upper third of the polygenic score distribution lived 0.55 y longer compared with those of offspring in the lower third. Overall, these results indicate that the genetic contributions to educational attainment are useful in the prediction of human longevity.
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| doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1605334113, hdl.handle.net/1765/94428 | |
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | |
| Organisation | Department of Applied Economics |
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Marioni, R., Ritchie, S.J. (Stuart J.), Joshi, P., Hagenaars, S., Okbay, A., Fischer, K., … Deary, I. (2016). Genetic variants linked to education predict longevity. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 113, pp. 13366–13371). doi:10.1073/pnas.1605334113 |
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