fixaging

As the body ages muscles gradually get weaker and less able to bear load. This has a huge impact on the whole body as muscles help to support the body organs and keep everything together. Also quality of life issues are impacted as with the reduction in strength comes the reduction in ability to carry about basic tasks and keep mobile. However it is possible to slow down and temporarily reverse these effects by doing strength training. It is already well known that resistance exercises improve muscle strength of old and young alike, but new research suggests that the effect may be actually turning back on the clock on the muscle aging.

This was identified in the online journal PLoS One. The gene expression profile in older adults muscle was compared with healthy young adults. Researchers found that the profiles deferred significantly. The difference indicated that the older muscle tissue had mitochondria (‘powerhouse’ of the cell) which were not functioning as well. However this was reversible, as was shown when 14 of the older adults spent 6 months strength training. After this period their gene expression profile matched more the youthful gene profile appearance. The lead study author was Dr. Simon Melov of the Buck Institute of Age Research.

SOURCE: PLoS One, online May 23, 2007.

Tags: Aging by Matias
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Adopting four healthy behaviours can add up to 14 years of extra life if you were not following them before. This includes not smoking, moderate alcohol intake, taking exercise and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables per day. These results come from a study published in PLoS Medicine journal. This conclusion was identified by comparing people who adopted these strategies from people who did not. Although there is much evidence to show that these factors on their own have a large impact on life span, this study shows that when combined they tend to have a cumulative effect.

The study was conducted by the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council (MRC), on data from 1993 to 1997, on 20,000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 79. Death amongst these people was recorded until 2006. A point scale was given to each person, where each point was awarded for a ‘healthy’ behaviour. With the lowest scorers as having the same likelihood of death as a 4 point scorer. Note that these factors where independent of social class and body mass index.

Although this study does not conclusively prove that changing lifestyle to be more inlign with this behaviour, it strongly suggests that adopting these behaviours will extend the lifespan of someone who does not currently follow them. Also note that the study took into account social class and BMI, adding further weight to the findings. At the end of the day these four strategies are not time consuming or too onerous.

Tags: Aging, 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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