Posted on 02/03/2009 2:36:04 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2009) A variation in the gene FOXO3A has a positive effect on the life expectancy of humans, and is found much more often in people living to 100 and beyond moreover, this appears to be true worldwide.
A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people. The results of the study appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("PNAS").
Previously, in September 2008, an American research team led by Bradley J. Willcox had published in PNAS a study that indicated a higher frequency of this genetic variation in long-lived Americans of Japanese origin (ages 95 and above). Professor Almut Nebel, the scientific leader of the "Research Group for Healthy Ageing" at Kiel, comments: "That published result is only of scientific value if it can be confirmed in a study with an independently chosen sample population. Without that there must still remain a tinge of doubt.
We have now eliminated that uncertainty about the connection between FOXO3A and longevity, both by our results from the German sample study and by the support from our French partners in Paris, whose research on French centenarians showed the same trend.
This discovery is of particular importance as there are genetic differences between Japanese and European people. We can now conclude that this gene is probably important as a factor in longevity throughout the world."
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Ah! Lazurus Long and “Time Enough for Love”.
Of course, who wants to live to be over 100 if you get all fugly and pruny and your fun zone parts dry up ?
bump for the Lazarus gene.
You can quit talking about me now.......:O(
News of the Tautological.
When I look back at all I remember of their lives, if it's not genes, then the secret - when you put them all together - is vodka and weak tea and cigars and organic food and junk food and going to church and not going to church and living clean and being surly as hell. Got it!
“...unfortunately, other researchers found that the gene is also disproportionately present in samples taken during puzzling autopsies of people who died in their 50s.”
;’)
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