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A study found that diseases such as diabetes and cancer that occur with aging are more affected by age and environment than by gene expression.
On the 7th (local time), a research team led by Professor Peter Sudment of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A., studied how regarding 20,000 human genomes are affected by aging, environment, and genetics. Research paper published in Nature Communications.
The result is that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation (DNA differences between individuals or between groups) in influencing gene expression profiles with increasing age. Gene expression profiles (transcriptome analysis) are used to analyze the causes and consequences of diseases, and are also used to determine how drugs or drug candidates function in cells or tissues.
Professor Sudment said, “In human genetics, a huge amount of research has been done to understand how genes are turned on and off by genetic variation in humans. “And the first thing we found was that as we get older, genetics doesn’t matter.”
In other words, when we are younger, individual genetic makeup can help predict gene expression, but as we get older, genetic makeup becomes less useful for predicting which genes increase or decrease.
This was the case for those over 55 years of age in this study. Identical twins have the same set of genes, but their gene expression changes as they age, meaning that the twins may age differently.
Professor Sudment said, “The most common disease for almost all humans is aging.” “The prevalence of all diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes increases with age.” “So far, enormous public resources have been invested in identifying the genetic mutations that predispose to these diseases. However, this study shows that the older you get, the less important the genes are for gene expression. We need to keep that in mind,” he said.
“We are all aging in different ways,” he said. “Young people are closer to each other in terms of gene expression patterns, but older people are farther apart.”
This study is the first to look at both aging and gene expression across a variety of tissues and individuals. The team built a statistical model to assess the relative roles of genes and aging in regarding 1,000 human tissues, 27 different human tissues, and found that the effects of aging varied by more than 20 times from tissue to tissue.
“In all tissues of our body, genetics is equally important (in the same amount),” the research team said. “However, aging varies greatly from tissue to tissue. Blood, colon, arteries, esophagus, adipose tissue, and age play a role in inducing gene expression patterns. It plays a much stronger role than that.”
Along with age, the environment also became an important variable.
The researchers found that the effects of air, drinking water, food and physical exercise levels were also indirect. The environment accounts for up to a third of changes in gene expression with age, he said.
