Healthy elderly people have a higher than normal presence of genetic variants offering protection from cognitive decline, initial findings from an eight-year-long study from the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) found.
The Scripps “Wellderly” (well elderly) Study analyzed the entire genome of 600 elderly people throughout the nearly decade-long study, and the first results were published in the journal Cell Thursday.
More than 1,400 people from across the county between 80 and 105, who have not developed any chronic medical conditions or diseases including cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes or heart attack, are enrolled in the ongoing study.
The findings suggest a possible link between long-term cognitive health and protection from chronic diseases.
Cancer, heart disease and diabetes account for 90% of all deaths in the United States.
“The Wellderly, as we’ve defined, are exceptional individuals who live into their ninth decade and beyond without developing a significant chronic medical condition,” said STSI Director Eric Topol, MD, who is one of the study’s senior authors. “Our findings indicate that protection from cognitive decline is associated, not necessarily cause and effect, with healthspan. Since healthspan is woefully understudied, much more work in large numbers of individuals across all ancestries is desperately needed. For this reason, we have made all the genomic data available to the research community and public to help spawn further research.”
John Rawlings, 90, of San Diego was inducted into the National Senior Softball Hall of Fame in 2009 – after he started to play the game in his 70s.
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“When I turned 90, they said, ‘Let’s have a big party,’” Rawlings said. “I told them, ‘You’d better wait until I turn 100.”
Rawlings is a World War II veteran and one of the study’s participants.
“This study is exciting because it is the first large one using genetic sequencing to focus on health,” said Stanford University Department of Genetics Chairman Michael Snyder, PhD, who was not involved with the research. “Most of the world’s scientists are studying disease, but what we really want to understand is what keeps us healthy. That is what the Wellderly Study is all about.”
Wellderly adults have a significantly lower genetic risk for Alzheimer’s and coronary artery disease, researchers found. However, no difference was in the genetic risk for cancer, stroke or type 2 diabetes, suggesting protective behaviors or other genetic characteristics might be at play among the Wellderly.
“We didn’t find a silver bullet for healthy longevity,” said Ali Torkamani, PhD, director of genome informatics at STSI and one of the study’s co-authors. “Instead, we found weaker signals among common as well as rare variant sites, which collectively suggest that protection against cognitive decline contributes to healthy aging.”
Interestingly, a group of ultra-rare coding variants found among 10 Wellderly patients was not found in any patients in a separate study of non-Wellderly people.
“Those gene variants might offer a pathway for the development of new treatments for Alzheimer’s,” Torkamani said.
“For many decades, we have searched for the genetic causes of disease in sick individuals,” noted founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai Eric Schadt, Ph.D., who was not involved with the STSI research. “The Wellderly Study presents an attractive alternative by studying those who are well in order to uncover the solutions nature has provided to protect us against disease. The initial discoveries around protective factors for Alzheimer’s disease and coronary artery disease demonstrate the keys the Wellderly may hold in unlocking ways in which we all may live healthier lives.”
Co-authors of the Cell report included Galina A. Erikson, STSI; Dale Bodian, PhD, ITMI; Manuel Rueda, PhD, STSI; Bhuvan Molparia, TSRI; Erick Scott, MD, STSI; Ashley Scott-Van Zeeland, PhD, STSI; Sarah Topol, RN, STSI; Nathan Wineinger, PhD, STSI; John Niederhuber, MD, ITMI; Dr. Topol; and Torkamani.
