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Concepts & theories

Longevity

Longevity, Langlebigkeit in German, means more than a long life. It means a longer healthspan, the years lived free of serious chronic disease, within a given lifespan. The word goes back to Latin longus (long) and aevum (lifetime). It is pronounced [lɒnˈdʒɛvᵻti]. The research field is geroscience, which studies the biological ageing processes summarised as the Hallmarks of Aging. Lifestyle carries a large modifiable share: movement, nutrition, sleep, social connection, stress management and prevention. The genetic contribution is estimated very differently depending on method: classic twin data put it near 20 to 30 percent (Herskind 1996), a large pedigree analysis corrected for assortative mating below 10 percent (Ruby 2018) and an analysis stripping out extrinsic causes of death near 50 percent (Shenhar 2026).

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Sources

  1. Kaeberlein M. (2018). How healthy is the healthspan concept?. *GeroScience*doi:10.1007/s11357-018-0036-9
  2. López-Otín C, Blasco MA, Partridge L, Serrano M, Kroemer G. (2023). Hallmarks of aging: An expanding universe. *Cell*doi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.001
  3. Olshansky SJ, Willcox BJ, Demetrius L, Beltrán-Sánchez H. (2024). Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century. *Nature Aging*doi:10.1038/s43587-024-00702-3
  4. Herskind AM, McGue M, Holm NV, Sørensen TI, Harvald B, Vaupel JW. (1996). The heritability of human longevity: a population-based study of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870-1900. *Human Genetics*doi:10.1007/BF02185763
  5. Ruby JG, Wright KM, Rand KA, Kermany A, Noto K, Curtis D, et al.. (2018). Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating. *Genetics*doi:10.1534/genetics.118.301613
  6. Shenhar B, Pridham G, De Oliveira TL, Raz N, Yang Y, Deelen J, et al.. (2026). Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% when confounding factors are addressed. *Science*doi:10.1126/science.adz1187

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