Genome-Wide Scan Informed by Age-Related Disease Identifies Loci for Exceptional Human Longevity.

ABSTRACT: We developed a new statistical framework to find genetic variants associated with extreme longevity. The method, informed GWAS (iGWAS), takes advantage of knowledge from large studies of age-related disease in order to narrow the search for SNPs associated with longevity. To gain support for our approach, we first show there is an overlap between loci involved in disease and loci associated with extreme longevity. These results indicate that several disease variants may be depleted in centenarians versus the general population. Next, we used iGWAS to harness information from 14 meta-analyses of disease and trait GWAS to identify longevity loci in two studies of long-lived humans. In a standard GWAS analysis, only one locus in these studies is significant (APOE/TOMM40) when controlling the

SUBMITTER: Fortney K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4683064 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature