In case anyone was curious like me: the standard deviation of lifespan is ~12-15 years in developed countries.
So environmental effects, sleep, diet, lifestyle, etc (I.e. modifiable factors) maybe account for half of that, so like 6-7.5 years of variance. Which… sounds about right to me.
Lifespan is not even half the story though, health span is much more important. Your life is completely different if you can ski or split your own wood at 80+ vs being barely able to use stairs at 50. Both might die at 90 but one "lived" 30 years more
I'm not really afraid of getting old, but I'm afraid of becoming decrepit.
My grandma has been decrepit for over 5 years now. She can't walk and has no bladder or bowel control, so she just sits on the couch and shits herself all day. She's not living, she's merely surviving. She was living with my mom for a while, but my mom decided she couldn't handle it anymore and put her in an assisted living facility.
If I get to the point where I couldn't cook my own meals and wipe my own ass, just put a bullet in me. I do not fear dying, but I do fear spending years of my life not being able to actually do anything.
It is probably more than half the story. Health span is strongly correlated to life span, although not completely. The median "health span gap" is about 10 years, and has widened by roughly one year over the past 20 years. However, this is probably just due to an aging population and not necessarily from any factors you can control fully.
I wouldn't be surprised if "health span" (although defining it is difficult) exactly mirrors the inheritability pattern of mortality.
My Dad (age 81) tore his rotator cuff splitting wood recently. It's slow to heal and he's in a lot of pain which (along with his Alzheimer's) is really getting him down.
Maybe even if you're still fit and strong in your 80s you should let someone else split your wood for you
Too many people think your life is a binary 'living or dead' when thats not the case at all. I didn't even understand it fully till I was hit by a car.
Yeah, been working in IT since forever (sitting work all day), but started lifting recently and it already made remarkable improvements in my wellbeing. Should've started sooner of course, but I'm still well in time.
Life span is easier to measure. You get the offial birth dates table, you get the official death dates table, you just substract the numbers and call it a day.
It is almost never reasonable to assume normality and make calculations like this. This is particularly the case when you are dealing with lifespan, which isn't normally-distributed even in the slightest. The actual ranges are likely smaller than you are stating here, and variance is just not a very practical or interpretable metric to use when dealing with such a skewed distribution.
We should be stating something like a probability density interval (i.e. what is the actual range / interval that 95% of age-related deaths occur within), and then re-framing how much genetic variation can explain within that range, or something like it. As it is presented in the headline / takeaway, the heritability estimate is almost impossible to translate into anything properly interpretable.
Since lifespan can't follow a power law distribution, I suspect the error in variance from assuming it IS normally distributed is far less than you're suggesting.
Like even if I'm off by a factor of 2, then only ~3ish years are explainable by environment/exercise/diet/etc. Then... OK... that's really not that bad of an error in this context. That also feels a little low to me. I'd have guessed around 5-8 years anyway based on my experience with healthcare and life.
This is a nice example/re-stating of what the heritability % "means" here.
I'm curious, with something like smoking/drinking, how you can be confident that you've untangled genetic predispositions to addiction or overconsumption from those "modifiable factors". I guess that's just captured within the 50% heritability? And if you could confidently untangle them, you might find heritability is higher than 50%?
Heritability is a pretty funky concept because it's contextual to a certain point in time, environment, and population, effectively.
An example I like is that if you measured the heritability of depression in 2015, and then you measured the heritability of depression in 2021, you would likely see changes due to environmental effects (namely, there's the pandemic/lockdowns and this could conceivably cause more people to experience depressive symptoms). Let's assume we make those measurements and the rate of depression did increase, and we could tie it causally to the pandemic or related events.
In that scenario, the heritability of depression would have decreased. I don't think anyone would argue there were massive genetic changes in that 6 year time period on a population scale, but the environment changed in a way that affected the population as a whole, so the proportion of the effect on the trait which is genetically explained decreased.
For something like lifespan in the above example, you can imagine that in a period of wartime, famine, or widespread disease the heritability would also decrease in many scenarios (if random chance is ending a lot of lives early, how long the tail of lifespan is influenced genetically is much less important).
Given that note, it's generally tricky to talk about whether heritability increases or decreases, but with more accurate estimates of how genetic predispositions form you could see the heritability of certain traits increase with the environment held stable, as there's certainly ones that may be underestimated or genetic factors that aren't currently accounted for in many traits.
*edit: I realized I never mentioned the other thing I wanted to mention writing this! since you mentioned what the percent heritability means here, I think the best way to think of it is just "the proportion of phenotypic variation for this trait in a measured population which is explained by genetic variation." So it's dependent on the amount of variation in several aspects (environmental, genetic, phenotypic).
Lifespan isn't as important as healthy lifespan. Lifestyle can mean the difference between being able to complete an Ironman triathlon at age 80 vs being bedbound.
> the standard deviation of lifespan is ~12-15 years in developed countries.
That seems rather higher than I would have expected, at least if one corrects for preventable accidents and other such things (that I would expect to shift the results away from a normal distribution).
Lifespan is a quite skewed distribution, so the SD looks large because it is in fact a poor summary of the bulk of the distribution. The actual part we care about for age-related mortality is narrower than such an SD would imply if we had a normal distribution (simple image example: https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/87851).
> at least if one corrects for preventable accidents and other such things
You can't really correct for these. Yes there are genuine accidents that will kill you under any circumstances, but for a lot of things both your odds of having an accident and the odds of surviving it are strongly linked to age. As a simple example, despite driving significantly less, the elderly get into more car accidents and suffer worse injuries in those accidents than people earlier in life. Only the age range of 15-24 has higher car accident fatality rates.
There is no such thing as death by old age. At most there are deaths in the elderly that don't get attributed to a specific cause (typically because of so many different things going on at once and no desire to cut up grandma after the fact to see which straw broke her back) which we tend to refer to as "died of old age" but it's not a recognized medical cause of death. People die of diseases, injuries, and various other things, many of which are strongly influenced by age but also heavily influenced by other factors.
You can set a cutoff point and say these things don't count as age related deaths whereas these others do. As long as you're consistent with these choices, you can learn something useful. But a wide enough net that is widely agreed to cover what we think of as aging is going to include a lot of other maladies, whereas a narrower selection criteria is probably going to yield wildly different results from one analysis to the next.
Environmental effects are not necessarily modifiable. It includes randomness, background radiation, unknown risk factors, anything which is not genetic.
>By contrast, intrinsic mortality stems from processes originating within the body, including genetic mutations, age-related diseases, and the decline of physiological function with age
So we put genetic diseases in the bucket of intrinsic mortality and then found that intrinsic mortality has a heritable component?
Yeah this paper came across to me basically as "if you ignore environmental causes of death, the heritability of death goes up"... which seems kind of circular.
Not necessarily. It could be the case that randomness plays a huge part in non-environmental caused deaths, and if that were the case we would see very little heritability.
I really like everything Uri Alon (last author) publishes, but these types of studies have a history of inflating genetic contributions to phenotypes. Decoupling genetics from environment is not easy as they are both highly correlated.
In fact, the article discussion states: "Limitations of this study include reliance on assumptions of the twin design, such as the equal environment assumption". My take on this is that the main result of the article is probably true, but the 50% figure is likely to be inflated.
There's no prior reason to expect the cited conditions to have any specific relation to genetics. Any of them could easily be caused or accelerated by environmental conditions.
Keep in mind this research is based on correcting twin study heritability estimates for confounding effects. However, new research shows that heritability estimates derived from twin studies are themselves dramatically inflated: https://open.substack.com/pub/theinfinitesimal/p/the-missing...
The 50% number is a bit mysterious, but if I understand the text of the article correctly, it essentially means that if we do not account for the noise added by accidents and such, we get a Pearson correlation of life expectancies of monozygotic twins of ~0.23. If we correct for accidents, the correlation rises to 0.5, hence 50% (with some further analysis they go up to 0.55, hence "above 50%" in the abstract). Now, in practical terms, this means that, given a MZ twin who died recently of natural causes, we could obtain an estimate for ourselves, but only if we make additional assumptions. A correlation coefficient alone is not very informative.
>Now, in practical terms, this means that, given a MZ twin who died recently of natural causes, we could obtain an estimate for ourselves,
Uh... am I misreading your comment, or are you suggesting that when your identical twin dies of non-accidental death, you can be pretty sure you're about to croak in the next wee days or weeks yourself? Very difficult to engineer that alarm bell (you either have a twin, or not), and too damned late to matter.
With a correlation of ~0.5 the window will be much wider than weeks or months, and it's more like, "If your MZ twin died of completely natural causes at 70, it is unlikely that you will live to 120."
There's a lot of genes that impact lifespan, both good and bad. For example my father has hereditary hemochromatosis due to 2 copies of the HFE C282Y mutation. He was diagnosed in his 50's, so I'd expect the damage it did to his body to impact lifespan.
In my case I don't have it (I'm just a genetic carrier). If I did have the genotype and took the necessary dietary measures to avoid the phenotype, then it likely wouldn't impact lifespan.
On one hand you can argue a heritable disease like HHC has an impact on lifespan, but with genetic testing and treatment you can argue it doesn't impact lifespan (or it's impact is significantly mitigated).
Yes but those aren’t random samples. Children not raised with their birth parents had different circumstances. As did children who got split up, and families adopting children is also a selection bias.
This is incorrect. Twin studies typically compare MZ twin similarity against (same sex, usually) DZ twin similarity. Assuming that there is nothing special about MZs for the trait (e.g. in this case if MZ twins lived longer by virtue of being MZ twins), you can estimate heritability free of shared environments.
If you look at dog breeds the difference between longest living (~15 years) and shortest (~10 years) is ~5years or 50% of the lifetime.
However we still struggle to appoint the very same to humans. In popular sciences and general understanding we still give so much attention to food and exercise and lifestyle and etc.
As if somehow changing the diet and exercise plan of Chihuahua you could make it into Doberman.
Of course, you play with the cards you get. Diet and exercise help. However you should still be aware about the game you play.
Western individualistic thinking struggles with the concept of biological limits. Our genes influence nearly everything we do or are, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Years ago, I read the book "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein. I was particularly struck by how sled racing dogs are now bred for motivation to train, rather than just their physical running ability. That is, breeders select for genes that make it so fun for the dogs to run that they keep going, while the dogs not bred this way just give up when they feel a little tired.
The story made me really think to what extent is my motivation to exercise, or do anything for that matter, affected by my genes? And if this sort of stuff is genetic, is there any more point to punishing myself for laziness than to feeling bad for being too short?
This finding rectified my mental model of longevity after a long, perplexing period where longevity was estimated to be much less heritable than expected when comparing to other studied traits.
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So environmental effects, sleep, diet, lifestyle, etc (I.e. modifiable factors) maybe account for half of that, so like 6-7.5 years of variance. Which… sounds about right to me.
I'm not really afraid of getting old, but I'm afraid of becoming decrepit.
My grandma has been decrepit for over 5 years now. She can't walk and has no bladder or bowel control, so she just sits on the couch and shits herself all day. She's not living, she's merely surviving. She was living with my mom for a while, but my mom decided she couldn't handle it anymore and put her in an assisted living facility.
If I get to the point where I couldn't cook my own meals and wipe my own ass, just put a bullet in me. I do not fear dying, but I do fear spending years of my life not being able to actually do anything.
I wouldn't be surprised if "health span" (although defining it is difficult) exactly mirrors the inheritability pattern of mortality.
Maybe even if you're still fit and strong in your 80s you should let someone else split your wood for you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year
Too many people think your life is a binary 'living or dead' when thats not the case at all. I didn't even understand it fully till I was hit by a car.
Some live a very painful and limited life. Others are 85+ and still go out to run, play soccer etc. Amazing to see.
We should be stating something like a probability density interval (i.e. what is the actual range / interval that 95% of age-related deaths occur within), and then re-framing how much genetic variation can explain within that range, or something like it. As it is presented in the headline / takeaway, the heritability estimate is almost impossible to translate into anything properly interpretable.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/87850/why-isnt-l...
Like even if I'm off by a factor of 2, then only ~3ish years are explainable by environment/exercise/diet/etc. Then... OK... that's really not that bad of an error in this context. That also feels a little low to me. I'd have guessed around 5-8 years anyway based on my experience with healthcare and life.
I'm curious, with something like smoking/drinking, how you can be confident that you've untangled genetic predispositions to addiction or overconsumption from those "modifiable factors". I guess that's just captured within the 50% heritability? And if you could confidently untangle them, you might find heritability is higher than 50%?
An example I like is that if you measured the heritability of depression in 2015, and then you measured the heritability of depression in 2021, you would likely see changes due to environmental effects (namely, there's the pandemic/lockdowns and this could conceivably cause more people to experience depressive symptoms). Let's assume we make those measurements and the rate of depression did increase, and we could tie it causally to the pandemic or related events.
In that scenario, the heritability of depression would have decreased. I don't think anyone would argue there were massive genetic changes in that 6 year time period on a population scale, but the environment changed in a way that affected the population as a whole, so the proportion of the effect on the trait which is genetically explained decreased.
For something like lifespan in the above example, you can imagine that in a period of wartime, famine, or widespread disease the heritability would also decrease in many scenarios (if random chance is ending a lot of lives early, how long the tail of lifespan is influenced genetically is much less important).
Given that note, it's generally tricky to talk about whether heritability increases or decreases, but with more accurate estimates of how genetic predispositions form you could see the heritability of certain traits increase with the environment held stable, as there's certainly ones that may be underestimated or genetic factors that aren't currently accounted for in many traits.
*edit: I realized I never mentioned the other thing I wanted to mention writing this! since you mentioned what the percent heritability means here, I think the best way to think of it is just "the proportion of phenotypic variation for this trait in a measured population which is explained by genetic variation." So it's dependent on the amount of variation in several aspects (environmental, genetic, phenotypic).
That seems rather higher than I would have expected, at least if one corrects for preventable accidents and other such things (that I would expect to shift the results away from a normal distribution).
You can't really correct for these. Yes there are genuine accidents that will kill you under any circumstances, but for a lot of things both your odds of having an accident and the odds of surviving it are strongly linked to age. As a simple example, despite driving significantly less, the elderly get into more car accidents and suffer worse injuries in those accidents than people earlier in life. Only the age range of 15-24 has higher car accident fatality rates.
There is no such thing as death by old age. At most there are deaths in the elderly that don't get attributed to a specific cause (typically because of so many different things going on at once and no desire to cut up grandma after the fact to see which straw broke her back) which we tend to refer to as "died of old age" but it's not a recognized medical cause of death. People die of diseases, injuries, and various other things, many of which are strongly influenced by age but also heavily influenced by other factors.
You can set a cutoff point and say these things don't count as age related deaths whereas these others do. As long as you're consistent with these choices, you can learn something useful. But a wide enough net that is widely agreed to cover what we think of as aging is going to include a lot of other maladies, whereas a narrower selection criteria is probably going to yield wildly different results from one analysis to the next.
So we put genetic diseases in the bucket of intrinsic mortality and then found that intrinsic mortality has a heritable component?
In fact, the article discussion states: "Limitations of this study include reliance on assumptions of the twin design, such as the equal environment assumption". My take on this is that the main result of the article is probably true, but the 50% figure is likely to be inflated.
And, in fact, it looks like they half-of-are.
Deleted Comment
Uh... am I misreading your comment, or are you suggesting that when your identical twin dies of non-accidental death, you can be pretty sure you're about to croak in the next wee days or weeks yourself? Very difficult to engineer that alarm bell (you either have a twin, or not), and too damned late to matter.
In my case I don't have it (I'm just a genetic carrier). If I did have the genotype and took the necessary dietary measures to avoid the phenotype, then it likely wouldn't impact lifespan.
On one hand you can argue a heritable disease like HHC has an impact on lifespan, but with genetic testing and treatment you can argue it doesn't impact lifespan (or it's impact is significantly mitigated).
So, take one cohort of twins raised together and see how well their life spans correlate.
Take another cohort of twins separated at or near birth and do the same.
Then, do some math magic with both to estimate heritability.
However we still struggle to appoint the very same to humans. In popular sciences and general understanding we still give so much attention to food and exercise and lifestyle and etc.
As if somehow changing the diet and exercise plan of Chihuahua you could make it into Doberman.
Of course, you play with the cards you get. Diet and exercise help. However you should still be aware about the game you play.
Years ago, I read the book "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein. I was particularly struck by how sled racing dogs are now bred for motivation to train, rather than just their physical running ability. That is, breeders select for genes that make it so fun for the dogs to run that they keep going, while the dogs not bred this way just give up when they feel a little tired.
The story made me really think to what extent is my motivation to exercise, or do anything for that matter, affected by my genes? And if this sort of stuff is genetic, is there any more point to punishing myself for laziness than to feeling bad for being too short?