Joint influence of small-effect genetic variants on human longevity

The results of genome-wide association studies of complex traits, such as life span or age at onset of chronic disease, suggest that such traits are typically affected by a large number of small-effect alleles. Individually such alleles have little predictive values, therefore they were usually excluded from further analyses. The results of our study strongly suggest that the alleles with small individual effects on longevity may jointly influence life span so that the resulting influence can be both substantial and significant. We show that this joint influence can be described by a relatively simple “genetic dose - phenotypic response” relationship.