NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Scientists have discovered a gene that appears to influence the length of a person's life.

The gene is named after Klotho, the Greek Fate, who spun the thread of life. A team of researchers found that a certain variant of the gene was more common in newborns than in people over age 65, suggesting that it somehow shortens life.

``The less-common klotho variant has a clear association with life expectancy in the groups we studied,'' lead investigator Dr. Hal Dietz, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a prepared statement.

Dietz and his colleagues analyzed the genes of 435 men and women over the age of 75 and 611 infants from a population of Bohemian Czechs. They also analyzed genes from 965 US men and women aged 65 or older (including whites and African Americans) and 646 US infants.

The investigators found that 3% of the infants had the klotho gene variant compared with about 1% of those over the age of 65. The findings suggest that infants with two copies of the klotho gene variant (one from each parent) are slightly more than twice as likely to die before the age of 65, the authors report in the January 22nd issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But while having two copies of the klotho variant seemed to shorten life, a single copy may extend life for Bohemian Czechs. Among people from this relatively homogenous ethnic group, 19% of infants had one copy of the klotho variant while 25% of elderly adults did.

``Until our findings are validated and expanded, there's no advantage to learning one's klotho status,'' Dietz noted in a prepared statement from Johns Hopkins.

``Furthermore, if additional studies prove that klotho is important, understanding what to do with that information is essential for developing productive genetic testing and counseling,'' he concluded.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2002;99:856-861.

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