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Background: Having longer lived parents has been shown to be an important predictor of health trajectories and life span. As such, parental life span is an important phenotype that may uncover genes that affect longevity.Methods: A genome-wide association study of parental life span in participants of European and African ancestry from the Health and Retirement Study was conducted.Results: A genome-wide significant association was observed for rs35715456 (log10BF = 6.3) on chromosome 18 for the dichotomous trait of having at least one long-lived parent versus not having any long-lived parent. This association was not replicated in an independent sample from the InCHIANTI and Framingham Heart Study. The most significant association among single nucleotide polymorphisms in longevity candidate genes (APOE, MINIPP1, FOXO3, EBF1, CAMKIV, and OTOL1) was observed in the EBF1 gene region (rs17056207, p = .0002).Conclusions: A promising genetic signal for parental life span was identified but was not replicated in independent samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Children of centenarians have lower cardiovascular disease prevalence and live longer. We aimed to estimate associations between the full range of parental attained ages and health status in a middle-aged U.S. representative sample. Methods. Using Health and Retirement Study data, models estimated disease incidence and mortality hazards for respondents aged 51–61 years at baseline, followed up for 18 years. Full adjustment included sex, race, smoking, wealth, education, body mass index, and childhood socioeconomic status. Mother’s and father’s attained age distributions were used to define short-, intermediate-, and long-lived groups, yielding a ranked parental longevity score (n = 6,055, excluding short–long discordance). Linear models (n = 8,340) tested mother’s or father’s attained ages, adjusted for each other. Results. With increasing mother’s or father’s survival (>65 years), all-cause mortality declined 19% (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.76–0.86, p < .001) and 14% per decade (HR = 0.87, 95% CI: 0.81–0.92, p < .001). Estimates changed only modestly when fully adjusted. Parent-in-law survival was not associated with mortality (n = 1,809, HR = 1.00, 95% CI: 0.90–1.12, p = .98). Offspring with one or two long-lived parents had lower cancer incidence (938 cases, HR per parental longevity score = 0.76, 95% CI: 0.61–0.94, p = .01) versus two intermediate parents. Similar HRs for diabetes (HR = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.84–0.96, p = .001), heart disease (HR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.82–0.93, p < .001), and stroke (HR = 0.86, 95% CI: 0.78–0.95, p = .002) were significant, but there was no trend for arthritis. Conclusions. The results provide the first robust evidence that increasing parental attained age is associated with lower cancer incidence in offspring. Health advantages of having centenarian parents extend to a wider range of parental longevity and may provide a quantitative trait of slower aging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]