Are you a morning or night person? It may help determine when you will shuck off your mortal coil.
No one can determine with any accuracy specifically when we will die, but a new study has found that a particular gene variation, the same one that seems to determine if you are a morning person or not, also predicts what time of the day you will die.
The adenine-adenine (A-A), adenine-guanine (A-G) and guanine-guanine (G-G) variants of a single nucleotide near a gene called "Period 1" varied between two groups that differed in their wake-sleep behavior.
When the investigators went back and looked at the people in the study (many of whom had enrolled more than 15 years ago at age 65) who had died, they found that this same genotype predicted six hours of the variation in the time of death: those with the AA or AG genotype died just before 11 a.m., like most of the population, but those with the GG genotype on average died at just before 6 p.m.
"So there is really a gene that predicts the time of day that you'll die. Not the date, fortunately, but the time of day," says Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Chief of Neurology Clifford Saper, MD, PhD.
Gene Distinguishes Early Birds from Night Owls and Helps Predict Time of Death - Science Codex
