United States: The recent expert’s report suggests that Genetics, along with lifestyle habits, determine what happens during aging processes, including disease development and estimated life expectancy.
The exact extent of how these factors affect diseases, plus reduced life expectancy, remains unexpected to most people.
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The exact extent of how these factors affect diseases, plus reduced life expectancy, remains unexpected to most people.
A major new international research study resulted in the publication of the Nature Medicine journal, which found that socioeconomic status combined with lifestyle habits impact healthy aging more powerfully than genetic factors do.
Researchers extracted data from UK Biobank research and data collection, which contained extensive genetic and phenotype information about the participants, as ksl.com reported.
According to the results of the research performed by 25 independent exposures associated with premature death, age-related diseases, and healthy aging, “We find that the major drivers of premature death and aging in our sample are smoking, socioeconomic status and deprivation, ethnicity, physical activity, living with a partner, sleep and mental and physical wellness including tiredness, as well as early life exposures including health and body size at 10 years and maternal smoking around birth.”
They also noted that there is a combination of several factors that form the “environmental architecture of mortality and aging,” and each of them plays a small but significant part while creating a “substantial amount of variation for premature mortality, far exceeding” that posed by genetic risk.
Moreover, Bryan Williams, chief scientific and medical officer at the British Heart Foundation, noted, “Your income, postcode, and background shouldn’t determine your chances of living a long and healthy life,” ksl.com reported.
“But this pioneering study reinforces that this is the reality for far too many people,” Williams added.
How were the findings made?
The researchers investigated 164 environmental factors together with genetic risk scores that measure the likelihood of developing 22 major diseases.
One essential aspect of the research involved using protein evaluation of blood samples to track chronological aging speed.
As senior author of the paper and St. Cross professor of epidemiology at Oxford Population Health, Cornelia van Duijn explained that their research examined lifetime exposures without hypothetical assumptions to determine what leads to disease and death.
Detailed view on environmental influences
Environmental influences account for 17 percent of variations in mortality, while genetic strengths identified so far only contribute 2 percent to death risks.
The five environmental variables that most influenced healthy or unhealthy aging among the 25 analyzed factors included smoking behavior combined with socioeconomic factors together with physical exercise and housing conditions.
Among the studied diseases, smoking directly contributed to 21 illnesses, but socioeconomic status variables led to 19 different diseases.
Physical activity impacted 17. The selected 23 variables proved amendable to change.
Early life experiences such as maternal smoking around birth and your weight at age 10 will affect both the aging process and death risk in the future.