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

Genetics: A Periodical Record of Investigations Bearing on Heredity and Variation

article

J. Graham Ruby¹  Kevin M. Wright¹  Kristin A. Rand²  Amir Kermany²  Keith Noto²  Don Curtis³  Neal Varner³  Daniel Garrigan²  Dmitri Slinkov³  Ilya Dorfman²  Julie M. Granka²  Jake Byrnes²  Natalie Myres³  Catherine Ball² 

[1] Calico Life Sciences LLC, South San Francisco, California 94080;Ancestry, San Francisco, California 94107;Ancestry, Lehi, Utah 84043

关键词: assortative mating;    heritability;    human;    life span;   

DOI  :  10.1534/genetics.118.301613

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Genetics Society of America

【 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 (∼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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY