Blood Iron Levels Could be Key to Slowing Ageing, Gene Study Shows
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:
Blood iron levels could be key to slowing ageing, gene study shows:
The international study using genetic data from more than a million people suggests that maintaining healthy levels of iron in the blood could be a key to ageing better and living longer.
[...] Scientists from the University of Edinburgh and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany focused on three measures linked to biological ageing - lifespan, years of life lived free of disease (healthspan), and being extremely long-lived (longevity).
[...] The researchers pooled information from three public datasets to enable an analysis in unprecedented detail. The combined dataset was equivalent to studying 1.75 million lifespans or more than 60,000 extremely long-lived people.
The team pinpointed ten regions of the genome linked to long lifespan, healthspan and longevity. They also found that gene sets linked to iron were overrepresented in their analysis of all three measures of ageing.
[...] Blood iron is affected by diet and abnormally high or low levels are linked to age-related conditions such as Parkinson's disease, liver disease and a decline in the body's ability to fight infection in older age.
Journal Reference:
Paul R. H. J. Timmers, James F. Wilson, Peter K. Joshi, et al. Multivariate genomic scan implicates novel loci and haem metabolism in human ageing [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17312-3)
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