Current genotyping studies, regardless of phenotype, typically rely on common ethnicity-specific HapMap tagSNPs to represent common variation in targeted regions (candidate genes) or within whole genomes (GWAS). We reason that healthy aging and longevity are unlikely to be due solely to the presence of a small number of common variants. This desirable phenotype may in part be due to absence of specific disease-causing alleles, as well as presence of favorable combinations of other alleles. For this reason, limiting association studies of healthy aging or longevity to testing common SNPs may be unsuccessful, or at best incompletely successful. Ultimately, more sophisticated analyses enabled by full genome sequencing will allow the assessment of both common and rare variants. In the meantime, a relatively cost effective approach for candidate gene-based analyses is to perform SNP discovery in cases with the phenotype of interest, for later comparison to appropriate controls. In this study, we not only establish a catalog of genetic variation in genes relevant to aging in healthy oldest old, we also use this data to ask whether current public SNP resources can
