Genes Of A Sibling May Determine Just How Old You Get

Could you live to be 110? Possibly, but your genes will have a lot to do with it, according to research conducted by scientists at Boston University Medical Center.

Researchers found that if a person has a sibling that has reached extremely old age, he or she is lucky. They're twice as likely to also reach into a ripe old age of xx number, as well.

For the study, researchers examined 1,500 participants, focusing on 1,900 sibling relationships in families with at least one person who had also lived well into their 90s.

"These much higher relative chances of survival likely reflect different and more potent genetic contributions to the rarity of survival being studied, and strongly suggest that survival to age 90 and survival to age 105 are dramatically different phenotypes or conditions, with very different underlying genetic influences," the authors noted, in a news release.

Findings revealed that if one had a sibling who reached their 90th birthday, the chance of that person also reaching extremely old age was twice as high as someone who did not have a sibling who went into old age. Furthermore, the results seem to grow as people aged.

For instance, for those with siblings who had celebrated their 95th birthday, they were nearly 3.5 times more likely to reach the old age of some high number. And, if that person is sharing the genes with a sibling, then that person is 35 times more likely to have that longevity as well.

"Findings from this and other studies of much older (and rarer) individuals show that genetic makeup explains an increasingly greater portion of the variation in how old people live to be, especially for ages rarer than 100 years," concluded Thomas Perls, study co-author and professor of medicine at the BU School of Medicine.

However, lets not forgot about environmental factors...

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences.

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