Scientists Find Genetic Correlation between Intelligence and Life Span
“For the first time, we were able to use genetic information to point us towards specific drugs that might aid in cognitive disorders of the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” said Todd Lencz, PhD, senior author of the study and professor at the Feinstein Institute and the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.
Investigators at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research discovered dozens of new genetic variations associated with a person’s general cognitive ability.
“All humans are 99.9 percent identical, and that’s what makes us human, but it’s that .1 percent of difference that makes us all unique,” Lencz said. “Those little differences can have ultimately an effect on things we can see, like eye and hair color. In this case, what we’re doing is looking at cognitive ability.”
Lencz said the genome-wide association study used small blood samples from 100,000 participants, and researchers looked at millions of different genetic elements in the DNA and measured their brain function with neuropsychological tests.
Those data were later combined with genomes from 300,000 additional people who had been measured for the highest level of education
attained, which Lencz said serves as an estimate for cognitive ability.“Ultimately, what we were able to do is identify certain key biological targets that may, in the future, be possible to affect with medications that could help people with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, and any disease of the brain that affects cognitive ability,” Lencz said.
While profiling cognitive ability, researchers also discovered a genetic overlap with longevity. They found when examining an individual’s family that a genetic predisposition towards higher cognitive ability was associated with longer lifespan. A new genetic overlap between cognitive ability and risk for autoimmune disease was also identified.
It is worth taking these genetic intelligence studies with a grain of salt. If anything, the more genetic overlap that is identified by these studies the more we realize how complex our genetic functions truly are. The reality is it’s not as simple as triggering a single gene to make one smarter, but Dr Lencz does note that as we collect more data these studies will become more and more accurate.
