Perhaps, Finch says, the ancient gene variant that ramped up our
inflammatory response and boosted the chances of our survival to the age
of reproduction—APOE e4—came with a steep, deferred cost: heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer's and other chronic diseases of aging. In fact, APOE
e4 appears to be a classic case of something biologists call
antagonistic pleiotropy, in which a gene has a strong positive effect on
the young and an adverse impact on the old. “I think these are very
intriguing ideas,” says Steven Austad, a biologist and gerontologist at
the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “And what
evidence we have supports them.”
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