Beyond signaling risk, blood pressure and obesity causally related to lifespan

Researchers are exploring the cause and effect relationships between common health indicators and lifespan, by analyzing polygenic risk scores (PRS), a numerical score of a person's risk for disease based on multiple genetic variants. Saori Sakaue, MD, a Ph.D. candidate at Osaka University, and her mentor Professor Yukinori Okada, recently showed that in addition to signaling inherited risk of a disease, PRS revealed that blood pressure and obesity are themselves causally related to lifespan. The research was presented at the American Society of Human Genetics 2019 Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas.