Secret to ageing well: It could be down to this gene

Have you ever wondered why some people age a lot faster than others? Why some people never seem to look older as the years go on?

Well scientists may have found the answer in a study conducted by Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and Unilever and it seems the reason some people may appear younger is down to a gene called MC1R which is responsible for the production of melanin – a pigment in the skin that protects it from UV radiation.

The new findings, published this week in the journal Current Biology, show that although sun exposure and other environmental factors play a role in how we age, possessing variants of the MC1R gene is actually more influential in how old we look.

Co-senior author Manfred Kayser, a forensic molecular biologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and his team used a combination of analyzing human genomes and human perception in the study. Eight million single nucleotide polymorphisms were analyzed and 30 white Unilever employees were asked to look at photos of participants to determine their perceived age, according to Scientific American.

What they found was that people who have a certain two copies of a variant MC1R gene were more likely to look up to two years older than people with only one copy of the variant.

The work, when developed further, could help scientists understand ageing at a higher level and look into ways to slow down visible signs of ageing. Dermatologists and geneticists are fascinated with the findings and are confident that this is the start to conducting more research into the MC1R gene and how we age.

“MC1R has been genetically associated with UV-induced skin damage, skin features like pigmentation, freckles and age spots, and with skin cancer. So it is perhaps not surprising that this gene plays a role in perceived age,” says João Pedro de Magalhães, from Liverpool University in England and who was not part of the study, as quoted in The Guardian. “I suspect larger studies will uncover many other genetic variants and this is only the beginning for this line of research. This could certainly open up new research directions for exploring clinical applications by targeting MC1R. As I am sure you are aware, there is a massive cosmetics industry focused on anti-ageing.”