The HWE (Hardy Weinberg equilibrium) test and linkage dis- equilibrium test were performed by Genepop 3.4 software (Ray- mond and Rousset, 1995) and Haploview software (Barrett et al.,

Table 1

There were several studies on the association between the above three SNPs and cancers. In 2006, a study showed that homo- zygote of the minor allele of (cid:2)1246C/T (rs35767) was associated with a reduction in the risk of breast cancer and a significant de- crease in circulating IGFBP3 levels in elderly Caucasian women (Canzian et al., 2006). Another study suggested that there was a 30% reduction of risk of colorectal cancer associated with posses-

Demographic parameters of the subjects in this study

Group N (Male/Female) Age (Mean ± SD, Nationality Range of years) age (year) Longevity 485 (246/239) 94.92 ± 3.15 Han Male P 90; Female P 94 Control 392 (180/212) 56.5 ± 10.10 Han 22–73

sion of one or two copies of the C allele compared with TT genotype of (cid:2)541T/C (rs5742612) in a Singapore Chinese population (Wong et al., 2005). Meanwhile, Iona Cheng et al. found that a haplotype block, which embraced the promoter area, was associated with prostate cancer and the SNP (cid:2)439T/A (rs2288377) was associated with prostate cancer, mainly due to linkage disequilibrium (Cheng et al., 2006). Although longevity people are generally free of the lethal age-related cancers (Bonafe et al., 2002), we could not find any association between the three SNPs and longevity in our study. The major reason might be the complicated relationship between cancers and longevity (Campisi, 2003), which can abate the effect of genetic association study. At the same time, different ethnic populations, sample size, and living circumstances for people in these studies can be another reason. The last but not least, the intricate Insulin/IGF-1 signal pathway in the ageing process can not be excluded. It has been reported that a composite score of selective variants in several Insulin/IGF-1 signal pathway genes was associated with height and longevity (van Heemst et al., 2005). That is to say, the variants in IGF-1 promoter region may work in tandem with variants in other genes in this pathway, which can not be shown in an association study which only in- cludes this region.

PPPeulavP2vs’nosraeP)%(elellaroniM)%(elellarojaM)%(etogyzomohelellaroniM)%(etogyzoreteH)%(etogyzomohelellarojaM

Our study provides no support for the association between the SNPs in the promoter region of the IGF-1 gene and longevity in the Han Chinese population. It is just a primary and explorative step to explore the possible function of this region in human longevity. Studies based on a larger subject group and longer potential se- quence segments in this region and other genes are required to test our results.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the persons who participated in this re- search. In addition, we thank Dr. Hui Li, Dr. Chengye Wang, and Kristen Choffe for their help in preparing the paper. This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2007CB507405), ‘‘Light in Western China” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30621092), Bureau of Science and Technology of Yunnan Province.

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