Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating

被引:115
作者
Ruby, J. Graham [1 ]
Wright, Kevin M. [1 ]
Rand, Kristin A. [2 ]
Kermany, Amir [2 ]
Noto, Keith [2 ]
Curtis, Don [3 ]
Varner, Neal [3 ]
Garrigan, Daniel [2 ]
Slinkov, Dmitri [3 ]
Dorfman, Ilya [2 ]
Granka, Julie M. [2 ]
Byrnes, Jake [2 ]
Myres, Natalie [3 ]
Ball, Catherine [2 ]
机构
[1] Calico Life Sci LLC, 1170 Vet Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94080 USA
[2] Ancestry, San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
[3] Ancestry, Lehi, UT 84043 USA
关键词
assortative mating; heritability; human; life span; UNITED-STATES; CULTURAL TRANSMISSION; LIFE-SPAN; MULTIFACTORIAL INHERITANCE; BIOLOGICAL INHERITANCE; SOCIOECONOMIC-STATUS; PATH-ANALYSIS; HEALTH; FAMILIES; MODELS;
D O I
10.1534/genetics.118.301613
中图分类号
Q3 [遗传学];
学科分类号
071007 ; 090102 ;
摘要
Human life span is a phenotype that integrates many aspects of health and environment into a single ultimate quantity: the elapsed time between birth and death. Though it is widely believed that long life runs in families for genetic reasons, estimates of life span heritability are consistently low (similar to 15-30%). Here, we used pedigree data from Ancestry public trees, including hundreds of millions of historical persons, to estimate the heritability of human longevity. Although nominal heritability estimates based on correlations among genetic relatives agreed with prior literature, the majority of that correlation was also captured by correlations among nongenetic (in-law) relatives, suggestive of highly assortative mating around life span-influencing factors (genetic and/or environmental). We used structural equation modeling to account for assortative mating, and concluded that the true heritability of human longevity for birth cohorts across the 1800s and early 1900s was well below 10%, and that it has been generally overestimated due to the effect of assortative mating.
引用
收藏
页码:1109 / 1124
页数:16
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