Are Alzheimer's and coronary artery diseases genetically related to longevity?

INTRODUCTION: In the last decade researchers have attempted to investigate the shared genetic architecture of longevity and age-related diseases and assess whether the increased longevity in certain people is due to protective alleles in the risk genes for a particular condition or whether there are specific “longevity” genes increasing the lifespan independently of age-related conditions' risk genes. The aim of this study was to investigate the shared genetic component between longevity and two age-related conditions. METHODS: We performed a cross-trait meta-analysis of publicly available genome-wide data for Alzheimer's disease, coronary artery disease and longevity using a subset-based approach provided by the R package ASSET. RESULTS: Despite the lack of strong genetic correlation between longevity and the two diseases, we identified 38 genome-wide significant lead SNPs across 22 independent genomic loci. Of them 6 were found to be potentially shared among the three traits mapping to genes including DAB2IP, DNM2, FCHO1, CLPTM1, and SNRPD2. We also identified 19 novel genome-wide associations for the individual traits in this study. Functional annotations and biological pathway enrichment analyses suggested that pleiotropic variants are involved in clathrin-mediated endocytosis and plasma lipoprotein and neurotransmitter clearance processes. DISCUSSION: In summary, we have been able to advance in the knowledge of the genetic overlap existing among longevity and the two most common age-related disorders.