Your life longevity can be depended on your uncle’s genes, says study

The last time we checked the only genes that mattered were your own, your parents’ and probably the ones you wore! Jokes apart! Turns out, there’s more than just your own and parents’ genes one must be concerned about as a recent study has found out that the key to longevity can probably be found in the genes of your long-living uncles and aunts and not just parents.

Carried out by the researchers from Netherland’s Leiden University and US' University of Utah, the study showed that a person’s chances of dying are reduced even if their parents didn’t have a long life, but had aunts and uncles who were among the top survivors in the family.

Top survivors refer to people in the top 10 percentage-wise of a group of people born in a family within a given time period.

“We observed the more long-lived relatives you have, the lower your hazard of dying at any point in life,” said lead author Niels van den Berg, a doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The team analysed genealogies of almost 314,819 people from over 20,360 families.

“Longevity is heritable, but that primarily applies to persons from families where multiple members are among the top 10 percent survivors of their birth cohort. The key to a long life can probably be found in the genes of these families,” said the paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Because the search for genes association with human longevity has been ongoing for a long time, this study was led to be far stricter in selecting the people in whom you have to look for those genes, the researchers said.

According to Ken Smith, Professor at Utah, the findings underscore the importance of constructing high-quality family trees that “allow us to observe complete life-spans of individuals over generations and in diverse locations”.