• Question: How does DNA affect our life expectancy?

    Asked by anon-256604 on 10 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Sonia Rodriguez

      Sonia Rodriguez answered on 10 Jul 2020:

      Hi Polina. Our life expectancy depends on many environmental and genetic factors. Although our life expectancy is not determined by our DNA, some variations can increase or decrease a bit our chances of living for longer. This happens because each person has a different DNA, with small differences in the instructions for creating the same proteins. Most of the times these variations make no difference at all, but sometimes these small changes in the DNA determine that the protein could work slightly better or slightly worse.
      How these small differences may affect life expectancy is something that many scientists have tried to understand analysing the DNA of thousands of people and comparing those data with the lifespan of their ancestors. Their conclusions are that some specific variations in the DNA have an impact in our life expectancy, but it’s something very complex and not easy to predict from just your DNA sequence.

    • Photo: Angela Downie

      Angela Downie answered on 14 Jul 2020:

      Hi Polina!
      This is a great question! And I think Sonia has done a great job in answering it! Whilst DNA is likely, to some extent to influence how long we live I don’t think, at the moment it would be possible to predict someone’s life expectancy just by looking at their DNA, there is just so much we don’t know. Our DNA codes for over 20,000 genes and to be able to accurately predict life expectancy we would have to know how changes to each of these genes impacts it, or at the very least know which of all these genes are the important ones to look at! On top of that the environment plays a massive role on our life expectancy, and people with identical genes but different lifestyles will live for different amounts of time.

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