In the last decade researchers have attempted to investigate the shared genetic architecture of longevity and age-related diseases and assess whether the increased longevity in certain people is due to protective alleles in the risk genes for a particular condition or whether there are specific “longevity” genes increasing the lifespan independently of age-related conditions' risk genes. The aim of this study was to investigate the shared genetic component between longevity and two age-related conditions.
We performed a cross-trait meta-analysis of publicly available genome-wide data for Alzheimer's disease, coronary artery disease and longevity using a subset-based approach provided by the R package ASSET.
Despite the lack of strong genetic correlation between longevity and the two diseases, we identified 38 genome-wide significant lead SNPs across 22 independent genomic loci. Of them 6 were found to be potentially shared among the three traits mapping to genes including
In summary, we have been able to advance in the knowledge of the genetic overlap existing among longevity and the two most common age-related disorders.