Conversely, all individual variants identified in our analyses showed directionally consistent effects in a meta-analysis of two European-ancestry studies of extreme longevity, and a test of association of a polygenic risk score of the variants was highly significant in the longevity dataset (p < 1.5 × 10 −5 ).
Testing 20 candidate SNPs for which we had data available, we find directionally consistent, nominally significant associations for six loci (p < 0.05, one-sided test), of which three have sex-specific effects.
At the same time, our inability to replicate several previous borderline significant longevity and lifespan findings suggests research into survival in general requires substantial increases in power to robustly identify loci.