Human longevity is heritable, but genome-wide association (GWA) studies have had limited
success. Here, we perform two meta-analyses of GWA studies of a rigorous longevity
phenotype definition including 11,262/3484 cases surviving at or beyond the age
corresponding to the 90th/99th survival percentile, respectively, and 25,483 controls whose
age at death or at last contact was at or below the age corresponding to the 60th survival
percentile. Consistent with previous reports, rs429358 (apolipoprotein E (ApoE) ε4) is …

Results Genome-wide association meta-analyses. We performed two meta-analyses in
individuals of European ancestry combining cohort-specific genome-wide association data
generated using 1000 Genomes imputation:(1) 90th percentile cases versus all controls and
(2) 99th percentile cases versus all controls. The numbers of cases and controls in each
study are shown in Table 1. For both case definitions, multiple genetic variants at the
wellreplicated APOE locus reached genome-wide significance (P≤ 5× 10− 8)(Table 2, Fig …