According to a large 2019 meta-analysis of seven separate longevity studies, with a total of nearly thirty thousand participants, people who carried at least one copy of APOE e2 (and no e4) were about 30 percent more likely to reach extreme old age (defined as ninety-seven for men, one hundred for women) than people with the standard e3/e3 combination. Meanwhile, those with two copies of e4, one from each parent, were 81 percent less likely to live that long, according to the analysis. That’s a pretty big swing.

