A rare variant in the CGAS gene, identified in multiple generations of long-lived Dutch families, appears to extend healthspan by dampening chronic inflammation without impairing immune defences, researchers from Leiden University Medical Center reported at the European Society of Human Genetics congress. The team analysed genomes from 212 sibling groups, narrowing the search to roughly 350 genes and pinpointing 12 rare protein-altering variants. Previous work showed that middle-aged offspring of long-lived parents develop cardiometabolic diseases on average 13 years later than peers, a delay now linked in part to this genetic signature. The variant likely leaves carriers with one fully functional copy of CGAS, reducing age-related inflammation while preserving infection-fighting capacity.

The finding arrives amid a broader reckoning over extreme-age records. Saul Newman, a population scientist at Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, has shown that many supercentenarian claims rest on faulty paperwork. In Greece, at least 72 per cent of centenarian records were pension-fraud cases where families concealed a death to continue collecting benefits. Such errors accumulate with age because individuals mistakenly recorded as older have a survival advantage on paper, eventually dominating datasets above 110 years. Newman argues that epigenetic clocks calibrated against these flawed records are suspect, and that only physical methods—radiocarbon dating, amino acid analysis in teeth and eye tissue—can provide a trustworthy yardstick.

Parallel work is clarifying how genetics shapes everyday behaviour and dietary risk. A University of Queensland team, drawing on UK Biobank data for 160,000 adults, mapped 325 taste and smell genes against preferences for 140 foods; onion lovers, for instance, showed lower rates of hypertension and type 2 diabetes, a finding validated with Mendelian randomisation in a separate British cohort. In the United States, studies employing the Yale Food Addiction Scale find that roughly 14 per cent of adults and 12 per cent of children meet clinical criteria for addiction to ultra-processed foods—products engineered to exploit primal drives for fat, sugar, and salt. Psychiatrists and psychologists add that automatic habits such as skin-picking or gaze aversion are not willpower failures but deeply wired coping and cognitive mechanisms, while a preference for spicy food correlates with sensation-seeking personality traits.

The next concrete milestone for the longevity genetics work is an in vivo test: the Leiden group is introducing the CGAS mutation into killifish, a vertebrate with a lifespan of three to nine months, to observe whether the variant extends healthy lifespan and tissue integrity. On the data front, Newman is pressing for a systematic re-audit of supercentenarian records using physical verification, a step that would recalibrate the field of ageing biomarkers.