June 2, 2021 – We can learn a lot from our elders, not just from their experience but also from their genes, say Italian scientists, who for the first time deciphered the DNA of people over 100 to find out how to avoid age-related diseases .
“The 105 threshold is really hard to cross, and those who cross it are really super athletes in terms of aging,” says Paolo Garagnani, PhD, associate professor of general pathology at the University of Bologna.
These “super centenarians” are remarkable because they also avoid the long periods of illness that so often overshadow older people’s final years of life, he says.
To find out what differentiates the elder from the old from the average person, Garagnani and his team combed Italy for people who had reached 105 and sequenced their genomes to find out how they could live that long.
Italy is ideal for such research because its population has one of the longest life expectancies in the world and the Catholic Church in the area keeps accurate records of baptisms that help researchers verify people’s ages.
The scientists took blood samples from 81 people and performed whole genome sequencing to look for differences between centenarians and younger people. And they found that people who live to be over 100 years old tend to have a unique genetic background that makes their bodies very efficient at repairing DNA.
The scientists also identified five common genetic changes between two genes, the COA1 and STK17A. These genes are involved in areas important to human cell health and the development of cancer, heart attacks, and stroke, diseases that centenarians seem to be less at risk of, Garagnani says.
Most of the people the scientists met lived independently for over 100 years and were not held back by disease. Often people who have lived that long suddenly die. “If enough for them, leave in a few days or a week.”
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Paolo Garagnani, PhD, Associate Professor of General Pathology, University of Bologna, Italy.
eLife: “Genome Sequencing Analysis of Half-Super Centuries.”
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