No shortage of dangerous DNA

MONTREAL — A Dutch woman who lived to 115 years old credited her longevity to pickled herring, refraining from smoking and limiting alcohol. But scientists are looking to the woman’s genetic blueprints, hoping to uncover the secrets of successful aging.

Any genetic secrets are still buried in the DNA that makes up the woman’s genome, but it has become clear that she did not lack genetic variants that may predispose other people to heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other aging-related illnesses, geneticist Henne Holstege of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam said October 14 at the International Congress of Human Genetics. Instead, the woman may have carried variants that protected her from the ravages of age.

What those protective variants might be remain a mystery. “We cannot say anything about the genome pieces that have to do with longevity,” Holstege said. The researchers will have to compare the woman’s genetic makeup with that of other extremely long-lived people, as well as average Joes and Janes, to find potential keys to long life.

The woman, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, agreed to donate her body to science at age 112. At that time, Holstege’s father, neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen, performed mental tests and found van Andel-Schipper to be at least as mentally sharp as a person nearly half her age.

After van Andel-Schipper’s death from a stomach tumor in 2005, researchers examined her brain and blood vessels for signs of disease that often accompany aging. They found nothing: She had no sign of the plaques or other degenerative proteins that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and her arteries were clog-free.

Holstege and her colleagues hope to finish the complete genetic blueprint from van Andel-Schipper by the end of the year and make the data available to other researchers.