Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has been awarded an $80 million grant to continue the Long Life Family Study, an international project tracking multiple generations of families that produce far more very old members than statistical models would predict, including some who reach 100 and beyond. The study began in 2004 and has now been running for two decades.
The premise is that families with clustered longevity carry something worth finding. WashU Medicine, one of the largest contributors to the Human Genome Project, has sequenced the whole genomes of every participant in the study, looking for genetic signals tied to long life. One consistent pattern has already emerged: most of these long-lived families show better cardiovascular health than the general population, with healthier blood pressures and lower rates of diabetes.
That matters because the diseases the study is circling - cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's - are the same ones expected to surge as populations age worldwide. Estimates cited by the researchers suggest the number of people over 50 living with at least one chronic condition of this kind could double by 2050.
Michael A. Province, PhD, the study's principal investigator and a professor in WashU Medicine's Department of Genetics, frames the goal as understanding how long-lived people manage to avoid or postpone the usual diseases of aging. If those mechanisms can be identified, the reasoning goes, they could point toward treatments and prevention strategies useful well beyond the families being studied.