fixaging

Heart disease not only has a high risk of death it also carries with it a huge quality of life burden. So even though medical breakthroughs have allowed heart attack survivors to get extra years, it also means that increasing numbers will end up with disability or have to live in a nursing home.

This was highlighted by a new study from the University of Michigan Health system and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. Among people with Congestive heart failure, it was found that they were much more likely to be disabled than people who lacked the condition. They were also found to have more problems with standard daily life activities, e.g. cooking, cleaning and walking around. They were also more likely to need care from a nursing home.

The study is from data of the 200 data of the Health and Retirement Study. Important points from the study:

People with Congestive Heart Failure are more likely to have home care (42%) compared to other groups (11%). 10% of people with heart failure are in nursing homes compared with 2%. People with heart failure are much more likely to have problems in daily living. For example 42% of CHF patients had limitations with walking across a room, compared with 12% for others.

This clearly demonstrates that heart disease, most specifically congestive heart failure not only has a huge mortality risk it also makes a great reduction in quality of life.

Tags: Heart disease by Matias
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Cosmetic surgery has gone from being something which only a minority of people do to something which is much more socially acceptable and affordable. In the UK in 2005, 300,000 cosmetic treatments were performed while in the following year 577,000 were performed (an increase of over 90%) and a market analyst Mintel predicts that in 2008 Britons will spend over 1 billions pounds on cosmetic surgery.

However a recent report by Which? based in the UK has found that some clinics are putting sales before safety. Ultimately cosmetic surgery still carries the risks associated with surgery, but even so it was found that sales people with no medical training were giving misleading advices on procedures. Douglas McGeorge, who is the president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, said the clinics where abusing the fact tat the public did not take the time to assess treatments.

The take home message from this is that although getting cosmetic surgery can certainly make improvements which may improve wellbeing, it is important to become aquainted with the risks/rewards before embarking on any alterations.

Find more information on this go to the bbc website

Tags: Life expectancy by Matias
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Having an active lifestyle appears to make people biologically younger, this is from a report from the January 28th issues of the Archives of Internal Medicine. This reinforces what many take for granted, but it is important to back up common sense with actual data.

Regular exercises have the following traits; lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, and osteoporosis. Lynn F. Cherkas, of Kings College London studies 2,401 twins, by having them fill in questionnaires on details such as physical activity, smoking and their socioeconomic status. The participants then gave blood samples from DNA. The length of their leukocyte ( immune cells) telomeres was measured. Telomeres are important as they potentially are marker for biological aging. Telomere length decreases on average by 31 nucleotides per year, while the men an women who were less physically active had shorter telomeres.

The mechanism via which exercise may slow down aging, is oxidative stress and inflammation levels which are higher with a sedentary lifestyle. However as ever with scientific reports of this nature it is important to note that correlation does not mean causation. This is exemplified by a quote from Jack. M. Guralnik, of the National Institute of aging from science daily.com

“Persons who exercise are different from sedentary persons in many ways, and although certain variables were adjusted for in this analysis, many additional factors could be responsible for the biological differences between active and sedentary persons, a situation referred to by epidemiologists as residual confounding,” Dr. Guralnik writes. “Nevertheless, this article serves as one of many pieces of evidence that telomere length might be targeted in studying aging outcomes.”

Tags: Aging by Matias
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I think it is important for serious money to be put into fixing the problems of aging, aging needs to have the same stature as other diseases such as Cancer, Heart Disease and Alzheimer’s. These other disease are all aging related diseases as the number one indicator of whether you are likely to die of one of these diseases is age. By making inroads into reversing the effects of aging, the likelihood of getting these other diseases will all decrease.

Recently discover magazine did an article on whether we can cure aging. In this article they choose to focus in on inflammation and try and identify it as a leading cause of aging, but one thing is certain with aging, there are various factors at play. However inflammation does seem to underlie many chronic illnesses such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease. One example of this is when Russell Tracy identified that protein CRP (an inflammation protein) is a very accurate predictor of a future heart attack.

One quote stood out from the discover article:

Researchers are also looking at new uses for old drugs—trying to prevent Alzheimer’s using ibuprofen, for example. “The research is really to prevent the chronic debilitating diseases of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, a molecular geneticist and director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “But if I develop a drug, it will have a side effect, which is that you will live longer.”

Aging should not be relegated to a side effect, when it is the main cause of these terrible diseases, and it seems odd that an institute called the Institute for Aging Research does not have longer life as ones of its primary goals. Many people think that curing Cancer would be a wonderful thing (and it would be) but even if you did this everyone would die a few short years afterwards of Heart Disease, or Alzheimer’s or other aging related diseases.

Tags: Aging by Matias
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More than half a million people in the uk have irreversible blindness which is caused by macular degeneration. This is close to 1 percent of the whole population. A large portion of these are the elderly. The disease is one where there is a progressive loss of vision in the center due to the degeneration of the macula, but there may be hope. A loss of site has a huge impact on quality of life.

A London based team is using a procedure whereby cells are taken from a suprplus human IVF embryo and are used to fix the eye. Professor P. Coffey and Lyndon da Cruz of UCL Institute of Ophthalmology teamed up the Professor P. Andrws of the University of Sheffield, to try and move this treatment into hospitals.

The procedure is as follows: surgical instruments introduced via three one millimeter holes in the eye, are used to go below the retina, then human eye cells from embryonic cells are introduced in a rolled up patch and injected through the hole, where the patch unfolds under the retina. This was initially tested on three sighted pigs and it took only 30 minutes. A human trial run has also been done, where the site of 4 out of 12 patients was repaired, by moving around the tissue of the patient.

Clinical grade cells are being produced in Sheffield for preparation for phase one trials.

Tags: Aging, Regenerative medicine by Matias
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