NW-Bound
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2008
- Messages
- 35,712
A couple of weeks ago, I read Being Mortal (2014) by Atul Gawande. In this book, I saw a paragraph about longevity that caught me by surprise.
This is in conflict with what we commonly accept, that is genetics is a large factor in human life. Now, we are told that our lifespan does not correlate well with that of our parents.
I went and searched further on this subject on the Web using the phrase "inherited longevity". I found a few research articles on this subject, but the scholarly papers I found were not written for laymen, and required professional membership or purchases of the papers. I did read the abstract of a couple of papers, and they reported that the correlation of parent/offspring longevity of a bit less than 0.3. This is still fairly weak. And there was a paper comparing lifespan of identical twins, and the conclusion was also that their longevity did not match well.
So, if lifespan depends mostly on nurture, why do doctors ask about our family medical history, and why we keep reading bout genes causing predisposal to certain diseases? Is it that inherited disease cases are not that common in population? Or a shared disease still does not mean a shared shortened lifespan?
“It turns out that inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity. James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany, notes that only 3 percent of how long you’ll live, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ longevity; by contrast, up to 90 percent of how tall you are is explained by your parents’ height. Even genetically identical twins vary widely in life span; the typical gap is more than fifteen years.”
This is in conflict with what we commonly accept, that is genetics is a large factor in human life. Now, we are told that our lifespan does not correlate well with that of our parents.
I went and searched further on this subject on the Web using the phrase "inherited longevity". I found a few research articles on this subject, but the scholarly papers I found were not written for laymen, and required professional membership or purchases of the papers. I did read the abstract of a couple of papers, and they reported that the correlation of parent/offspring longevity of a bit less than 0.3. This is still fairly weak. And there was a paper comparing lifespan of identical twins, and the conclusion was also that their longevity did not match well.
So, if lifespan depends mostly on nurture, why do doctors ask about our family medical history, and why we keep reading bout genes causing predisposal to certain diseases? Is it that inherited disease cases are not that common in population? Or a shared disease still does not mean a shared shortened lifespan?