Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update
Contents:
1. A Viking-Jewish Ashkenazi Link?
(a) Jewish Vikings? A DNA mystery
(b) From an ancient kingdom, the mutant that can fight off AIDS
2. Unhappy marriages can be fatal, increasing male death rate by 19%: Israeli study
Misery during marriage is a 'risk factor just like smoking,' say Tel Aviv researchers, leaving men 69% more likely to die from a stroke
3. Only as old as your genes: Ashkenazi 'super-agers' could hold key to long life
By RICH TENORIO,
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1. A Viking-Jewish Ashkenazi Link?
(a) Jewish Vikings? A DNA mystery
https://tracingthetribe.blogspot.com/2006/10/jewish-vikings-dna-mystery.html?m=0
Extracts:
Researcher Marc Buhler believes he has tracked down the source of a genetic marker shared by individuals with Jewish and Viking ancestral origins. The marker in question is a mutation that may be an inherited shield against AIDS.
The question: How do people from such different regions carry this genetic inheritance? Where did their paths cross?
One in five Caucasians share a common ancestor who carried that marker, says Buhler, who believes the mutation's carrier lived around 800 CE, northeast of the Black Sea in the Khazars' neighborhood.
In Australia, he tested 807 Ashkenazi Jews and 311 non-Jews, and found the marker in one in four Ashkenazi Jews, and in one in three whose grandparents came from Russia, Poland, Austria or Czechoslovakia.
Buhler believes the genetic marker came to Scandinavia when Swedish Vikings visited the area between 800-1000 CE, and was distributed to Ashkenazi Jews when many of them left Germany after a 1350 bout of plague and traveled east, mingling with the Jews of the Khazar region.
He says that a previous study indicated the incidence of this marker in about one in three Ashkenazi Jews and one in four Icelanders.
(b) From an ancient kingdom, the mutant that can fight off AIDS
https://www.smh.com.au/national/from-an-ancient-kingdom-the-mutant-that-can-fight-off-aids-20030712-gdh327.html
July 12, 2003
Extracts:
Today the mutation is widespread among Caucasians and helps protect carriers against infection with the AIDS virus.
Marc Buhler, a Sydney geneticist, has pieced together this colourful history of the mutation's origins to explain its particularly high prevalence in populations as disparate as Jewish people in Australia and people living in Iceland.
The mutation, in a gene known as CCR5, was discovered in 1996. People with one copy usually take several years to become ill if they acquire HIV. People with two copies rarely become infected,
Mr Buhler, of the Kolling Institute of Medical Research, tested DNA from about 1400 Australians and found about 15 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews (from Germany and Eastern Europe) were carriers, but only 6 per cent of Sephardic Jews (from southern Europe and Africa).
When family history was taken into account, he found about 20 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews had the mutation if their grandparents had come from Russia, Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
Around the turn of the millenium, the upper classes in Khazar adopted the Jewish religion. Then, 300 or more years later, when the plague hit Europe and Jews were thrown out of Germany, some travelled east "to find refuge with their Jewish cousins in Khazar", he said. They, too, would have acquired the mutation.
The region was absorbed soon after into Russia.
"But the genetic artefact of the long forgotten Kingdom of Khazars persists in the Jews and in the Vikings today."
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2. Unhappy marriages can be fatal, increasing male death rate by 19%: Israeli study
Misery during marriage is 'risk factor just like smoking,' say Tel Aviv researchers, leaving men 69% more likely to die from a stroke
By NATHAN JEFFAY
https://www.timesofisrael.com/unhappy-marriages-can-be-fatal-increasing-male-death-rate-by-19-israeli-study/
21 June 2021, 6:06 pm
Extracts:
Men who are unhappy in their marriages are at higher risk of death, especially from strokes, Tel Aviv University scholars have concluded.
'What we found, which is surprising, is that dissatisfaction among men with their marriage is a risk factor for death, of a similar magnitude to smoking, or men failing to exercise,' Dr. Shahar Lev-Ari, the public health researcher behind the study, told The Times of Israel.
Men who were dissatisfied with their marriage were 19 percent more likely, on average, to die during the 32-year-long study than others of their age who were satisfied.
Fatal strokes were 69% more common among those who felt they had an unsuccessful marriage compared to those who indicated a very successful marriage.
'The results of our study suggest that marital dissatisfaction may predict an elevated risk of all-cause mortality,' the researchers wrote in the article.
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3. Only as old as your genes: Ashkenazi 'super-agers' could hold key to long life
'By RICH TENORIO, 18 September 2020, 11:06 pm
https://www.timesofisrael.com/only-as-old-as-your-genes-ashkenazi-super-agers-could-hold-key-to-long-life/
Extracts:
Intrigued by an Ashkenazi Jewish population in New York whose members often lived healthy lives past age 90 or even 100, [Dr. Nir] Barzilai has devoted much of his career to studying such advanced agers. ...He has gleaned insight from a population sample that now totals almost 3,000, including about 750 centenarians and their children.
'People age at different rates,' he explained. '[Some] look 10 years younger, some 10 years older. There is a biological age. If you're aging relatively quickly, you start accumulating diseases after the decade after [age] 60.'
These include the so-called 'Big Four' of disease: diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. But not so for the Ashkenazi super-agers in his population sample.
'The first thing we learned is the most important,' Barzilai said. 'It's not that they get sick. Everybody gets sick.'
Yet, he said, the centenarians he studies live healthy lives 20 to 30 years longer than others born around the same time period.
'[At the end] of their life, they die rapidly, quickly, without disease [for their] last five to eight years like us,' Barzilai said, noting that when diseases finally do come, they last only 'for a few weeks.' He calls this 'a huge longevity dividend' that could potentially yield knowledge of how to 'slow aging' and make 'a lot of the need for hospice and medical care for disease go away.'
Barzilai's own family includes his super-ager uncle Irving, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor of multiple concentration camps. After World War II, Irving moved to Czechoslovakia, only to flee during the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. More recently, following a move to Houston, he lost his house to a hurricane four years ago but rebuilt it.
Throughout, Barzilai said, his uncle approaches life with the same philosophy: 'He asks himself what's next, bring it on, nothing's going to kill me.'
Barzilai characterizes the centenarians he has interacted with as generally 'positive thinking, grateful, thankful, extroverts.'
Yet he said it is a mistake to assume these qualities are lifelong. He notes that significant changes may occur with age, from losing one's spouse to moving into assisted living. And, he said, science has disproved the belief that personality remains constant after age 70.