( 1)
The article said that 92-year-old Josephine
Tesauro lives in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although he is very old, he still has a straight back, strong teeth and good health. He can also drive to visit friends, go to church and go shopping. But her twin sister is in great condition.
Differences: incontinence, hip replacement surgery, basic loss of vision, in addition to Alzheimer's disease and so on.
According to the report, even experts who study aging were surprised when they knew this case: the twin sisters shared the same genes, grew up in the same family and lived in the same place all their lives. Why is aging so different from health?
Modern science has several explanations for aging and longevity. Decades ago, people thought it was determined by environment, diet, exercise and medical care. Then there are genes.
Theoretically, due to different genes, some people are destined to live to 100 years old by eating steak and smoking cigarettes, while others cannot. This view is still very popular now.
However, some recent studies have found that genes are not very important in determining people's longevity and health except for individual longevity families. In other words, it is usually impossible to predict a person's life span from the life span of relatives.
James Vaupel, director of the German Max Planck Institute, who studies human life span, said.
According to the introduction, for example, people's height has a lot to do with heredity, but life expectancy is far from it. Don't say that it is difficult to predict a person's life span from parents. Even identical twins have different life spans.
The average age is over 10 years old.
Life span is a wonderful thing. Especially in old age, you may feel depressed at some point, and you may not see any specific reasons. Between different people, some are weak and some are weak.
Be strong. Of course, it is generally believed that strong people live longer, but not all people, because some people look weak but can live all the time, and some people look strong but may die at once.
According to the report, some diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease or early heart disease, are more related to heredity than diseases such as cancer. But even for these diseases, just because someone has a genetic predisposition doesn't mean they are.
Will get sick; In fact, most people with a genetic predisposition to a specific disease will not be affected by this disease. To say the least, even if you have some diseases-even diseases with high mortality-it doesn't mean that this person will die of this disease.
So it is difficult to predict a person's life span. Kaare Christensen, a professor of disease transmission in Denmark, said that scientists can predict certain probabilities, such as obesity and smoking, which will make people short-lived; But when it comes to predicting a person, there is almost nothing you can do.
(2)
Another example in the article is James.
Leon lives in Michigan. His father died of heart disease at the age of 55, and it was only six hours from onset to death. Not only that, one of his two cousins died at the age of 57 and the other at the age of 50. Especially people who are 50 years old.
Well, I have always been healthy and energetic, but one day I will leave immediately. Because of this example, James Lyons began to fidget at the age of 50.
But 25 years later, 75-year-old James Lyons is still healthy. He outlived most people in his family. What is the reason? Nobody knows.
In order to study this problem, Christensen started with twins-because they have the same genes and are easy to compare. He and his colleagues collected all identical twins (about 20,000 people) born in Denmark, Finland and Switzerland from 1870 to 19 10.
The survey results show that the influence of genes on life expectancy is much smaller than expected by the public and scientists in advance. Even twins with identical genes have very different life spans.
In another study, scientists studied nearly 45,000 pairs of twins in Northern Europe and investigated the cancer prevalence. It was found that in many cancers, only a few can see the relationship with genes.
These diseases include breast cancer, prostate cancer and rectal cancer. However, even if we can see that these three cancers are related, the correlation is not very big: if one twin has cancer, the prevalence rate of the other twin is less than 15%. this
This result makes people feel that it is far-fetched to use genes to explain the incidence of cancer-because if so, the prevalence of a twin will be close to 100%. Therefore, the United States
Robert Hoover of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
In the past, some researchers thought that if we had some data (such as a person's genome composition), we could predict its prevalence. Obviously, this idea needs to be reconsidered
According to the report, scientists don't know what determines people's life span and can only explain it by randomness.
(3)
As far as longevity and health are concerned, the ancients believed that evil people would lose their lives and have short lives; People who do good will accumulate virtue, prolong life and benefit future generations. Many old people used to say so, and there are many records in ancient books. Even Zhuge Liang lost his life because he injured too many people in the battle.
From another point of view, let alone whether a person's life span is random or "life and death depend on fate", but if there is justice, whether a person chooses to do good or evil will still have an impact on his future.