Change some of them is in our hand

Do we carry longevity in the blood? Popular wisdom would surely answer yes, that a family history full of octogenarians and nonagenarians is a good indicator that our life will be long. Science, however, seems to point out in the opposite direction.

17%. A new study on aging and longevity has calculated The weight that various factors have about our future health and the risk of premature death. One of the most surprising results is in the effect, relatively scarce, of genetic predisposition against environmental factors.

The latter explain 17% of the variation in the risk of death in the population studied, a significantly greater than that of the low 2% associated with the genetic predisposition. According to the study responsible for the study, among the environmental factors with the greatest impact on this risk were smoking, the socioeconomic situation, physical activity and living conditions.

“Our research demonstrates the deep impact of exhibitions that can be changed, either by individuals or through policies for the improvement of socio -economic conditions, reduction of smoking, or the promotion of physical activity,” explained in a press release Cornelia Van Duijn, co -author of the study.

Different diseases, different forms of impact. The team also observed differences in the degree in which some factors or others hit the risk associated with certain diseases. The study showed that while environmental factors had a greater impact on some diseases (such as those that affected the lungs, heart and liver), genetics had a greater weight in dementias and in some cancers such as breast.

Almost half a million participants. The study was conducted thanks to the data compiled by UK Biobank, a database with which the team could study the influence of a total of 164 environmental and genetic factors, and its impact on aging and premature deaths in the sample.

Evaluating people aging is a complicated task. The team studied some diseases related to this process, but also resorted to a “new clock of aging”, a biological clock Based on some proteins present in the blood.

The details of the process were published In an article In the magazine Nature Medicine.

Lessons for the future. The results of the study can guide us when finding the focus on public health interventions. “These results underline the potential benefits of focusing interventions on environments, socio -economic contexts, and behaviors in the rpevention of diseases related to premature age and death,” Austin Argentieri addedwho led the work responsible for the work.

Part of the relevance of the work is widely of the analyzed sample and the significant amount of data studied within the framework of the study.

Manuel Collado, CNB-CSIC researcher at the CIMUS of the University of Santiago de Compostela, who was not involved in work, He stood out for Science Media Center Spain The robustness of the study, “a fantastic collection of samples and data of thousands of people who are being used intensely by many researchers. But, in addition, to add robustness to the study, their conclusions have also been confirmed in groups of people from different geographical areas. ”

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Image | Peggychaucair