{"id":13458,"date":"2019-10-06T11:47:36","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T11:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=13458"},"modified":"2019-10-06T11:54:41","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T11:54:41","slug":"predicting-life-span-an-ethical-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2019\/10\/predicting-life-span-an-ethical-nightmare\/","title":{"rendered":"Predicting life span &#8211; an ethical nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most fascinating articles earlier this year was the report of Timmers et al. \u00a0about the &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.7554\/eLife.39856.001\">Genomics of 1 million parent lifespans implicates novel pathways and common diseases and distinguishes survival chances<\/a>&#8220;. \u00a0\u00a0The British-Swiss-Estonian-Chinese-US collaboration identified by\u00a0genome-wide SNP association of 1 million parental lifespan some new genes (ABO, ZC3HC1, and IGF2R) and replicate others (CDKN2B-AS1, ATXN2\/BRAP, FURIN\/FES, ZW10, PSORS1C3, 5q33.3\/EBF1 and FOXO3).<\/p>\n<p>Most of the variance is explained by disease variants that lead to dementia, cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer &#8211; of course people die of disease and not by bad genes. So whether correct or not, what worries me more is the construction of polygenic hisk scores that show a mean lifespan difference of around five years of life across the deciles.<\/p>\n<p>This may become an ethical nightmare whenever treatment allocation will dependent on a polygenetic risk score that is largely irrelevant in an individual.<\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 27.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most fascinating articles earlier this year was the report of Timmers et al. \u00a0about the &#8220;Genomics of 1 million parent lifespans implicates novel pathways and common diseases and distinguishes survival chances&#8220;. \u00a0\u00a0The British-Swiss-Estonian-Chinese-US collaboration identified by\u00a0genome-wide SNP association of 1 million parental lifespan some new genes (ABO, ZC3HC1, and IGF2R) and replicate &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2019\/10\/predicting-life-span-an-ethical-nightmare\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Predicting life span &#8211; an ethical nightmare<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics-biology","category-philosophy-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13458"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13590,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458\/revisions\/13590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}