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Another potential method to live a longer and healthier life is to get a dog. However if you are not a dog owner and acquire one merely to live longer this may not be a sensible strategy as the time spent taking care of the dog will probably be more than the extra years gained.

The British Journal of Health Psychology reviewed many papers to find out the benefits to owning a pet dog. In the report Dr. Deborah Wells, from Queen’s University in Belfast stated that owners of dogs tended to have lower cholesterol and blood pressure. To add weight to her claim, a study of over 5000 people conducted at the Baker Medical Research Institute in Melbourne found that pet owners had significantly lower systolic blood pressure and cholesterol than non-owners.

Dr. Well postulates here of the reasons for dogs promoting well-being:

“It is possible that dogs can directly promote our well-being by buffering us from stress,” said Dr Wells, “The ownership of a dog can also lead to increases in physical activity and facilitate the development of social contact, which may enhance both physiological and psychological human health in a more indirect manner.”

Dr. Wells found that pet owners tended to be healthier in general, but that dogs appeared to have a better influence on well being than cats. Reinforcing this point in the report was the point that people who took cats and dogs from animal shelters noticed a decrease in minor health complaints, but only dog owners kept these improvements after 10 months.

In a study appearing in Public Health Reports in the USA, in1980’s, demonstrated that survival rates of heart attack victims who had a pet where 28 percent higher, that patients who had no pet. Alan Beck, at Purdue University postulated that the contact with pets triggered a relaxation response in the owner and would reduce stress levels. For dogs specifically the extra exercise gained while taking the pet for walks could also account for the difference.

To counter balance this optimism, it needs to be stated that pet owners, and non pet owners tend to be two very distinct groups of people, and as such it could be another trait which pet owners share which could be causing this effect, for example pet owners may eat more healthy foods than non-pet owners.

Tags: Aging, Life expectancy by Matias
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You can use the age transformer provided by St. Andrews University to find out. You will need a picture of yourself where your full face can be seen. Alternatively you can use a picture of a celebrity to see the effect.

Of course this can only give you a guideline to what you will look like in the future. It will also depend on how you live your life, for example someone who spends much more time in the sun than another will tend to have more wrinkles, age spots and generally skin in worse condition.

Tags: Aging by Matias
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What to do; go to your doctor, request to get your LDL, HDL and triglycerides measured, compare the results against the tables below. If you are not in the lowest risk category and you are approaching middle age, then consult with your doctor on what changes you can do and make changes to reduce your risk of heart disease. Come back in one month (or sooner if you
doctor recommends it or you have a higher risk) and re-measure to see if the changes you have made are having an effect. If no changes have occurred it might be time to go for drug intervention. If you are getting older then you should be testing yourself regularly.

Some useful definitions:

• Cholesterol - is a lipid(fat) found in cell membranes of all tissues, and it is transported in blood of all animals.
• LDL - low density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol), LDL’s main job is to transport cholesterol and triglycerides from the liver.
• HDL - high-density lipoprotein (good cholesterol), HDL’s also transports cholesterol and from the liver, about 30% of blood cholesterol is carried by HDL. The reason that HDL is called ‘good cholesterol’ is that it is hypothesises that it can remove cholesterol from arteries.
• triglycerides - are a major component in very low density lipoproteins (VLDL) and play an important role in metabolism as energy sources and transporters of dietary fat.
• TC - total cholesterol , measures the total amount of cholesterol in the blood, note this is not so useful as it does not explain the ratio between HDL and LDL
• Heart disease - this is a range of conditions, all surrounding the cardio-vascular system, it is generally any condition which affects the heart muscle or the blood vessels of the heart, either weakening of the artery walls or build up of plaques within the walls of the arteries or complete blockage.

HDL

LDL

Triglycerides

Tags: Aging by Matias
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The number one risk factor for dying of heart disease is your age. 83 percent of people who die of coronary heart disease are over 65. From this you can see that by tackling the root cause of heart disease which is the effects of aging we can drastically reduce the incidence of heart disease.

What you can do to cut your risk of getting heart disease:

• Fund aging research - by donating to aging research which is specifically targeted to counteract aging effects you will help ensure that you and your children do not get heart disease.
• Exercise - an inactive lifestyle is a risk factor in heart disease. So with regular moderate or vigorous activity heart disease risk can be reduced, the more vigorous the better, though if you have not exercised for a while it is best to start gradually.
• Lose weight - people who have excessive body fat, particularly around the waist, are more likely to get heart disease and stroke. So if you are overweight you can reduce your risk by eating more healthily and exercising.
• Stop smoking - a smokers risk of developing a coronary heart at is 2 to 4 times more than a non-smoker. Its time to stub it out.
• Monitor your cholesterol - high cholesterol is another risk factor, this can be modified by diet, but its important to find out whether you have high blood cholesterol to start with, so go get a check-up.
• Monitor your blood pressure - a high blood pressure makes the heart work harder, increases risk of heart disease, and when it exists with other risk factor risk of heart attack or stroke increases several fold.
• Control diabetes - if you have diabetes it is essential that it is managed as about 3/4 of people with diabetes end up dying because of heart or blood vessel disease.
• Calm down - stress may be a factor in heart disease, or at least lead to other factors such as overeating or smoking, so if you are stressed out, identify what it is that is stressing you out and work on removing this from your life.
• Drink less alcohol - if you drink too much alcohol you can raise your blood pressure increase risk of stroke or heart attack, if you are drinking more than one or two drinks per day it would help to cut down.

Tags: Aging, Heart disease by Matias
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One the arguments commonly heard against extending life spans is that it will lead to overpopulation. However this is not the necessarily the case, without curing aging we could end up with a depopulation problem.

Whether there will or won’t be growth in population is governed by the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), this measures the number of children each couple will produce during their lifetime, if this runs at below 2.1 then population will shrink. Other factors can counteract this on a national scale, e.g. even though the U.K. has a Total Fertility Rate of less than 2.1 its population is growing due to immigration. However once a global Total Fertility Rate drops below 2.1 the world population will eventually start to drop. TFR has already dropped dramatically. In 1950-1955 global TFR was 5.0, while in 2000-2005 it had dropped to 2.65. The current rate of the developed world is 1.56, and for Europe it stands even lower at 1.38. If it were not for immigration most would have shrinking populations today. On these trends it is predicted that the total world population will peak at around 9 billion then drop.

Take as an example India, it has seen its fertility rates plummet, from 1990 where it was at 4, and only 15 years later in 2005 fertility rate is down to 2.9, if this trend continues then India will fall below replacement rate in 10-15 years. In China TFR is already below replacement rate at 1.75.

One of the major contributors to the decrease in fertility could be television. Here is a quote from Phillip Longman’s presentation at the Long Now foundation:

“Seriously, though. Demographers are paying more and more attention these days to how television affects fertility, especially in the Third World Here’s an example of why the case is so compelling. Since 1975, Brazil’s fertility rate has dropped by more than half to just 1.9 children per woman. This is not the result of a family planning program, since Brazil has never adopted one. Instead, studies show that births have declined from one region to the next coincident with the introduction of television. Today, the number of hours that a Brazilian woman spends watching television predicts how many children she will have. What’s on Brazilian television? Mostly domestically produced soap operas, called telenovelas. These soaps rarely address reproductive issues directly. Instead, they typically depict wealthy individuals living the high life in big cities.”

Actually this depopulation could lead to severe consequences as an elderly and increasingly retired population must be supported by a smaller working population. If life extension technologies where in place this would be mitigated.To read much more detail on this upcoming depopulation problem see Phillip Longman’s presentation.

Tags: Aging by Matias
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