Tag Archives: longevity

Scientists discover longevity gene

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New York: A gene variation that helps people live long lives also protects their memories and their ability to think and learn, say researchers from the US Institute of Aging Research.

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York carried out a study of 282 older Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors came from northern Europe found that those who had the gene variant were twice as likely to have good brain function as those who did not. The study looked at 158 people 95 and older and 124 people between the ages of 75 and 85.

The team discovered that the variant increases the size of cholesterol particles in the blood, making them much less likely to lodge in blood-vessel linings and cause heart attacks and strokes. They also thought the altered gene may protect against the development of Alzheimer’s disease, although they are not sure how it does so.

The report published in the Journal of Neurology says that scientists are currently trying to develop drugs to mimic the effect of the gene variation for people who don’t possess it.

Olive oil increases longevity, says Danish report

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Copenhagen: Four teaspoons of olive oil a day can help protect against cancer, says a new report by researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital.

In a study of 182 European men, levels of 8-oxodG, which reflects cell damage, was measured in urine. Men whose diet included 25 militres (0.9 fluid oz) of olive oil, had 13 per cent less of the substance.

The Danish team said it could explain why many cancer rates are higher in northern Europe than in the south, where olive oil is a major part of the diet.

Dr Henrik E Poulsen, of Rigshospitalet, Denmark, who led the study, said: “Every piece of evidence so far points to olive oil being a healthy food. By the way, it also tastes great.”

Life expectancy and levels of obesity and other diseases of ageing are lower in Mediterranean countries. The diet which is rich in olive oil, fruits and vegetables is credited with promoting good health.

The secret of living longer

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Honolulu: Keeping fit inmiddle age can add an extra ten years to your lifespan, say scientists.

In one of the largest studies ever carried out, they conclude that far from being down to luck, health and habits at middle age determine your chances of hitting 85.

Those who keep fit, avoid smoking, drinking too much and are free of common diseases in their 50s have three times the chance of reaching their 80s in good health than those with bad habits.

Experts in the US study, which is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, say the key rules for living longer are: eating healthily; staying slim; monitoring blood pressure and cholesterol; exercise; keeping your brain active; and getting married.

The conclusions come from a study of 6,000 men aged 54 over 40 years, repeatedly testing them for six major diseases as well as mental and physical impairment.

Almost 2,500 lived to 85. And more than one in 10 was still free of disease, physically able to walk half a mile with ease and showed no sign of mental decline.

It also found that the biggest things these survivors had in common was their behaviour in middle age.

In fact, the research by the Pacific Health Research Institute and Kuakini Medical Center in Hawaii concluded that men in their 50s who were completely healthy and had no bad habits had a 55 per cent chance of reaching 85 with no major problems.

However, those who had at least six risk factors in their 50s such as smoking, eating an unhealthy diet, being overweight, drinking too much, high blood pressure or cholesterol only had a nine per cent chance of getting to that age in a healthy state.

Dr Bradley Willcox who led t he study said: “These men provide an important window for understanding what is realistically possible for healthy ageing in men.”

“Measures from this study, such as grip strength, suggest that it is important to be physically robust in midlife, ” he wrote. “This is consistent with theories of ageing that suggest that better-built organisms last longer and that physiological reserve is an important determinant of survival.

“In summary, we have identified several potentially important risk factors for healthy survival in a large group of middle-aged men. These risk factors can be easily measured in clinical settings and are, for the most part, modifiable.

“This study suggests that common approaches that target multiple risk factors simultaneously, such as avoidance of smoking or hypertension, and approaches that enhance insulin sensitivity, such as maintaining a lean body weight, may improve the probability of better health at older ages.” It had been thought that living longer was largely down to having “good genes” or simply being lucky.

But this latest study proves that although some diseases such as cancer cannot be avoided, most of the major risk factors, including heart disease, lung disorders and some blood glucose disorders, can be prevented simply by eating a good diet, avoiding cigarettes and taking exercise.

The study does not find that abstinence is a key to long life. Men who lived to 85 still enjoyed up to three alcoholic drinks a day.

Cool mice live longer!

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La Jolla: Mice cooled by half a degree below normal had a life expectancy 20% longer, or the equivalent of 7-8 additional human years.

The result implies that chilling human blood could also stretch out our lifespan, if a safe way can be found to do it. “Maybe from the point of view of survival, 37 is not exactly optimal,” says lead researcher Bruno Conti of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

It has long been held that the ideal human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius. But this new study suggests that 36.5 °C might be even better.

Researchers have known for decades that a diet containing a third less calories than usual extends the lifetime of mice and other mammals by up to 40% and drops their body temperature by half a degree or more.

It was not known whether the cooler temperature helps stave off ageing or is simply a by-product of the low-calorie diet. And this is virtually impossible to test, because mammals maintain the same temperature regardless of the surrounding clime.

Conti’s team managed to cool down mice using genetic engineering. They used a gene called uncoupling protein 2, which diverts the cells’ mitochondria from their usual task of making chemical energy, and instead prompts them to release energy as heat.

They inserted this gene into a group of brain cells in the animals’ hypothalamus and near to the region that senses and controls body temperature, much like a thermostat. The gene effectively heated up the thermostat and, as a result, tricked the rest of the body into cooling down by 0.3 to 0.5 °C.

Cooled female mice had a life expectancy 20% longer and males 12% longer. The mice appeared to live typically healthy lives up to the point that they died; they were not simply stretching out their frail, elderly days. The results are published in Science1.

The study suggests that the lower body temperature accounts for some of the age-fighting effects of calorie restriction. It may be that the cooler temperature slows down metabolism and the manufacture of by-products such as free radicals that damage and age cells.

“You don’t necessarily have to eat less to have the beneficial effects,” Conti says.

“Not many people are willing to spend their lives starving themselves,” says Cliff Saper who studies sleep and feeding at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. If, on the other hand, researchers can find a way to carry out the same brain-warming gene therapy in people, “You could get people to sign up for that.”

Nobody knows why 37 °C is, on average, the temperature that evolution favoured for humans and most other mammals, but it is generally assumed to be optimal for biochemical reactions.

So if 36.5 °C helps animals to live longer, why wasn’t it selected for through evolution? The cooler temperature probably has no selective advantage because it stretches out life after reproduction, and does not affect the ability of animals to have children and pass on their genes. And although Conti’s mice appeared normal, it’s possible that the lower body temperature actually causes subtle health problems.

“If there is a selective advantage to being cooler, evolution would have pushed us in that direction,” Saper says.

Conti suspects that some people may have small differences in their core body temperature that might alter their rate of aging, perhaps making some longer-living than others. This would only be possible to test using small, swallowed or implanted thermometers such as those carried by the experimental mice.
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Red wine the elixir of youth?

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Boston: A substance in wine could prove to be an elixir of youth that holds back many of the effects of ageing, new research suggests.

Obese mice on high-calorie diets lived longer and had healthier hearts and livers when given the compound, resveratrol.

The molecule reversed gene activity patterns associated with diabetes, heart disease, and other obesity-related conditions.

Dr David Sinclair, one of the US researchers from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, said: “The ‘healthspan’ benefits we saw in the obese mice treated with resveratrol, such as increased insulin sensitivity, decreased glucose levels, healthier heart and liver tissues, are positive clinical indicators and may mean we can stave off in humans age-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, but only time and more research will tell.”

Resveratrol is a powerful antioxidant produced by certain plants as a defence against the effects of injury and fungal infection.

It is commonly found in grape skins, peanuts and mulberries, and is especially plentiful in red wine.

Drinking red wine has been suggested as one explanation for the French Paradox – the fact that heart disease death rates are lower in France than in other industrialised countries with similar risk factors.

In 2003, researchers found that yeast treated with resveratrol lived 60 per cent longer than normal. Later experiments showed that the compound also extends the lifespans of worms and flies by almost 30 per cent, and fish by nearly 60 per cent.

The new findings, published in the journal Nature, are the first to show increased survival in mammals.

“Mice are much closer evolutionarily to humans than any previous model organism treated by this molecule, which offers hope that similar impacts might be seen in humans without negative side-effects,” said Dr Sinclair.

The scientists found that at 60 weeks of age, overfed mice given resveratrol began to survive three to four months longer than those not receiving the compound.

This trend continued, and at 114 weeks, which represents old age in mice, more than half the animals not treated with resveratrol died.

In contrast, at least two thirds of those in the resveratrol group continued to survive.

Overweight treated mice were generally healthier than overweight mice that were not treated.

Untreated mice had higher blood plasma levels of insulin, glucose and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), all markers that in humans predict the onset of diabetes.

At 18 months of age, the livers of high calorie, untreated mice were twice the size and weight of those given resveratrol. The treated mice had livers similar to those of animals on standard diets, and their livers were more normal at the cellular level.

Tests also showed that mice fed resveratrol were physically more co-ordinated and had better motor skills.

Dr Richard Hodes, director of the US National Institute on Ageing (NIA), which took part in the research, said: “There is currently intense interest in identifying interventions that can be applied to improve health and survival, especially as our society ages.

“Today’s basic science findings are a notable step in this effort.”

Dr Sinclair is a co-founder of Sirtris, a company which has developed a formulation of resveratrol now being used in an early clinical trial involving diabetes patients.

Americans living longer than ever before

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New York: Life expectancy in the US has almost doubled in the last century. When the US population reached 100 million in 1915, the average lifespan was 54 years. When the population hit 200 million in 1967, it was around 70.

Today, with a population of 300 million the average lifespan of someone living in the US is nearly 78.

Some experts on aging believe that within 50 years, the average person living in an industrialized nation with good access to health care will live to be at least 100.

During the first half of the 20th century revolutionary advances in medicine and public health were responsible for raising the average life expectancy in the U.S. by more than 20 years — from age 47 in 1900 to age 68 in 1950.

According to the CDC, the 10 greatest medical and public health achievements of the 20th century were:

* Vaccination against disease, resulting in the eradication or elimination of major diseases of the early 20th century, such as smallpox and polio
* Control of infectious disease through improved sanitation, clean water sources, and the introduction of antibiotics
* Improvements in motor-vehicle safety
* Improved workplace safety
* Improved food safety
* Decline in deaths from heart disease and strokestroke
* Smaller families with longer birth intervals due to family planning
* Better prenatal care
* Fluoridation of drinking water
* Public health efforts to reduce smoking

The biggest single factor in the increase in life expectancy during the latter half of the 20th century and beyond has been the improvement in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiovascular disease, the experts agree.

In just the last 25 years, there has been an almost 50% reduction in deaths from strokestroke and heart attacks in the U.S.

Cancer deaths are also declining, driven largely by public health efforts to educate Americans about the dangers of smoking. Lung cancer deaths among men have been declining since the mid-1970s, and increases among women have begun to stabilize.

Dramatic reductions in infant mortality and easier access to emergency care have also helped increase life expectancies in the last three decades of the 20th century.

Americans are living longer but are they living better? Are the extra years worth it in quality-of-life terms? Or are they filled with avoidable suffering related to failing health?

Certainly, most people who make it to their eighth decade experience age-related health challenges. The average 75-year-old has three chronic health conditions, and the list of chronic diseases that are linked to aging seems endless. Heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetesdiabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseaseParkinson’s disease, and arthritisarthritis are just a few.

But there is some intriguing clinical evidence that in spite of their health problems, older people today really are happier, healthier, and are functioning better than their parents or grandparents.

Hard work and fresh air secret of long life, says 103 year-old

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London: Retired farmer, Jim Webber, is still gardening at the age of 103, and is believed to be Britain’s oldest worker.

He works a regular week tending the pub garden in his village in the county of Dorset.

The great grandfather has looked after the garden at the New Inn in the village of Stoke Abbot for the past twenty years and says he will carry on his work until he is too old. He has also never had a holiday and takes a shot of whisky to give him the occasional energy boost.

He says: ‘I tried stopping work when I retired but I was so bored. Bored and miserable. I’d just sit in my chair doing nothing and looking out the window.

‘I have to keep going because some of these youngsters are a bit slack and need looking after.

Mr Webber, born in 1902, spends around ten hours a week at the pub and has seen off several landlords during his 20-year tenure. He is paid £3 an hour for his time.

Widower Mr Webber, who has two granddaughters and three great grandchildren, arrives for work on his 30-year-old Ferguson tractor, known locally as the ‘Tin Pony’. Until this year he carried out most of his duties alongside his brother Jack, who died in July at the age of 95. He usually wakes at 4am.

Mr Webber, who still has a full clean driving licence and will turn 104 on Christmas Eve, said: ‘I’m not sure there’s any secret to a long life – just hard work and lots of outdoors.’

Life begins at 100 say longevity experts

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Bali: Medical breakthroughs hold out the prospect of living longer and healthier lives, with current life span norms set to be turned on their head, according to anti-ageing experts.

“Life begins at 100? This is an unthinkable today, but in the future, 100 can be pretty young,” Robert M. Goldman, chairman of the American Academy of Anti-Ageing Medicine, told a conference on the resort island of Bali.

Stem cells, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and therapeutic cloning are being used in the relatively new field of anti-ageing medicine.

Goldman instanced a calendar with naked pictures of actress Sophia Loren at the age of 71 wearing only a pair of earrings underlined how perceptions of age had changed.

“If somebody told you 14 years ago that they were going to have a former sex symbol pose in earrings only, you would have been disgusted or you would have closed your eyes,” he said. “Today she looks great at the age of 71.”

Stem cell therapy will allow people to regain lost hair, remove wrinkles by renewing skins, and grow new nerves for paralysed patients, Michael Klentze, director of the Klentze Institute of Anti-Ageing in Munich, Germany, told Reuters.

Stem cells have the ability to act as a repair system for the body, because they can divide and differentiate, replenishing other cells as long as the host organism is alive.

“People who have hair loss they can hope in the next months they’ve got new hair, not strange hair, but their own hair,” he said.

He said a new method called proteomic diagnostics could detect prostate cancer through a urine test years before regular scans discovered it.

“We can stop the progress of a prostate cancer and we don’t need a biopsy or anything else. No operation, no nothing.”

He said people had different risk factors depending on gene mutations inherited from their ancestors and if these factors were identified and measured correctly, people could expect to live longer and healthier.

“If you measure these very exactly, then you know very early you should change your lifestyle. But it is very important not to start this when you’re 85 years, but start at 40 or 45,” he said.

Klentze disputed, however, Goldman’s concept of life beginning at 100.

“There’s a limit to how long you can live. It’s not possible and it’s not what we want. We want a normal life, 85 or whatever but healthy,” he said.

“US males are more into life extension, they’re talking about life extension, living 150 years. For the Europeans, it’s more live a good life, vital and healthy.”

Both these experts will speak at Anti-Ageing London, a conference held at the Royal College of Physicians in Wimpole Street London from 15-17 September – for more information go to www.antiageingconference.com

Longevity – it’s all in the genes

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LOS ANGELES – A World War 1 veteran has defied health experts by living until the age of 112, despite a diet of that included sausages and waffles.

George Johnson who lived in Richmond was considered California’s oldest living person at 112 until he died last Wednesday, as a result of pneumonia. Mr Johnson’s wife died in 1992 at the age of 92.

Dr L Stephen Coles, of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California in Los Angeles said that Mr Johnson’s genes had contributed to his longevity.

Mr Coles commented: “A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity. But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle.”

Johnson, who was blind and living alone until his 110th birthday when a caregiver began helping him, built the Richmond house by hand in 1935 and got around using a walker in recent years.

Johnson was the only living Californian considered a “supercentenarian,” a designation for those ages 110 or older, Coles said. His group is now in the process of validating a Los Angeles candidate who claims to be 112 years old.

Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson’s health.

“All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets,” Coles said.

“Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia,” Coles said. “He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer’s.

“This is a mysterious case that someone could be so healthy from a pathology point of view and that there is no obvious cause of death.”

The family was in favor of an autopsy. Relatives said Johnson wanted them to allow it if it would help science.

Born May 1, 1894, Johnson’s father managed the Baltimore and Ohio Railway station in Philadelphia.

Johnson was working in 1917 as a mail sorter for the U.S. Post Office when he was drafted into the Army. The war ended a year later, and he never served in combat.

Two years later, he and his wife moved to Northern California.

“It was a great adventure in those days. We were young and wanted the experience,” Johnson said in a March interview with the Contra Costa Times.

The couple settled in Fresno and remained there until 1935, when they bought property in Richmond. They used lumber salvaged from dismantled buildings to build their house.

During World War II, Johnson worked at the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond and later managed the heating plant at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland.

He remained in good health and continued driving until he was 102, when his vision began to fail.

Gerontology Research Group http://www.grg.org

Obesity now a major health risk in UK

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London: Obesity is a major health risk in the UK, the British government warned today.

Health officials called on parents to take more responsbility for their diets and that of their children. Children in the UK are five times more likely to be overweight and than their parents.

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said that obesity cost the country’s National Health Service more than £1bn and that obese people were twice as likely to suffer from diabetes and heart disease.

She said the cause was the decreasing amount of exercise taken by adults and children, even though the average number of calories consumed had fallen.

Anti-ageing tea better than water

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Drinking tea is more beneficial than drinking water, according to research published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Tea not only rehydrates you as well as water does, but it can also offer protection against heart disease and cancer because it contains protective antioxidants known as flavanoids.

The researchers say their findings could benefit older members of the population, many of whom do not drink much water and so run the risk of dehydration.

Previous studies have shown that drinking just three a day can cut the risk of having a heart attack by 11 per cent.

It has also been shown to stave off some forms of cancer, including colorectal cancer.

Other health benefits include reducing tooth decay and possibly improving bone strength.

Some studies have suggested the caffeine in tea can also help concentration and improve your mood.

The key component is a group of antioxidants called flavonoids – a major component of tea – which help prevent cell damage.

Like fruit and vegetables, tea is a good natural source of flavonoids – three cups actually contain eight times the antioxidant capacity of an apple.

UK has higher levels of bad fats in foods than rest of Europe

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Copenhagen: Some convenience foods in the UK contain more unhealthy fats than the same foods bought in other parts of Europe, a study by Danish scientists has found.

An international survey of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlets, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows how customers are being unwittingly exposed to potentially harmful levels of the processed fats – trans fats. Two tip supermarkets Sainsbury’s and Tesco have already announced they are removing trans fats from own-brand products.

Trans fats are produced by heating vegetable oils to very high temperatures or by bubbling hydrogen into them. They are used for frying in fast-food outlets and to help prolong the shelf life of cakes and biscuits.

Eating 5 grams of trans fats daily can increase the risk of heart disease by 25%, according to research. Most consumers are unaware of the amount of trans fats they are eating because manufacturers and fast-food outlets are not legally obliged to declare the volumes.

The survey has shown the level of trans fats can vary widely between apparently identical products. Researchers bought a large serving of chicken nuggets and french fries from outlets of McDonald’s in America and Europe.

Sixteen per cent of the cooking oil used for the french fries was comprised of trans fats in the UK, compared with 10% in Germany, 5% in Spain and 1% in Denmark.

An outlet in New York had the highest levels of trans fats, with each meal containing more than 10 grams, compared with more than 6 grams in the UK, over 5 grams in France and less than 1 gram in Denmark.

The researchers also bought chicken nuggets with fries from KFC outlets. Hungary had the most trans fats, with 25 grams in one serving. The UK serving had about 3 grams of trans fats.

McDonald’s said trans fats levels varied between countries because of the use of different oils: British outlets use rapeseed oil, while palm oil is used in Denmark. The company is aiming to cut trans fats in British outlets to the levels in Denmark by 2008.

KFC said is striving to find alternative oils to cut trans fats. :

Life expectancy leap by decades

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LONDON: Lifespan will increase by decades within thirty years because of scientific developments, a leading scientist has predicted.

In 2004, the UK Government’s Actuary Department statistics predicted that the average British male who lived to 65 could expect to reach 84.

But Cambridge-based biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey says that decades-longer lives may change traditional patterns of family life, careers, retirement, education and child-raising and force radical changes to pensions.

Life expectancy has already risen sharply in Britain. On average, a man aged 65 could expect to live for another 12 years in 1950. This is expected to rise to 21.7 years by the middle of the century. Although life expectancy is higher for women, its increase is slower, possibly due to the fact that women are adopting male lifestyles including drinking and smoking.

New longevity study

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Boston: A new study is trying to determine the secret to living to age 100 by looking at genetic and environmental characteristics common to people in families who live longer.

Dr Thomas Perls of the Boston University Medical Centre which is carrying out the study says: “Exceptional longevity runs very strongly in families. Where people have a markedly increased chance of living longer so we want to find out what these family members have in common, as in environment, behavior and genes.”

One such person is Tony Pierro, who is 110-years-old and credits diet.

“Three good meals,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

His brother, Nick Pierro said: “The secret is to learn early in life to have peace of mind.”

Nick’s son, Rick, 57, who’s also taking part in the study, agrees.

“I think you have to go with their outlook – have no problems, no worries, keep headaches to a minimum, good eating. Your health is very important,” he said.

Researchers conducting the study are looking for families with at least two siblings who are 90 or older to take part in the study.

Europeans living longer, says new EU study

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Brussels: A 14-nation study comparing life expectancy and health of Europeans has found that people are living longer across the board, but differences are still notable between countries.

In 2003, Portugal had the lowest life expectancy at birth for men, some four years less than the highest, Sweden. Women’s life expectancy was lowest in Denmark and highest in France. Italy and France were the top two nations for life expectancy among women. Like in the recent World Cup final, Italy again narrowly beat France in term of male life expectancy.

Between 1995 and 2003, life expectancy at birth rose in all 14 European countries surveyed by an average of three months per year for men and two months for women, notes the report from the first year’s work of the European Health Expectancy Monitoring Unit (EHEMU), a project funded by the European Commission’s EU Public Health Programme (2004-2007).

“Whether the extra years of life gained were spent in good or bad health remains a crucial question,” commented Professor Carol Jagger in a statement from the University of Leicester, which co-leads the EHEMU project.

Disability-free life expectancy varied more widely across the EU countries, she continued, “but this may be due to cultural differences in how people report disability”. Ranking countries by the number of years people live without disability is not feasible using current data, the researcher suggested.

“However, the trends between 1995 and 2001 will be less sensitive to such differences so we can compare how disability-free life expectancy is tracking life expectancy between countries,” she confirmed.

The report found that, between 1995 and 2001, Belgium, Italy and Spain appeared to be the healthiest countries as both men and women’s disability-free life expectancy at birth was increasing faster than life expectancy.

In Denmark, Great Britain and Portugal, disability-free life expectancy was increasing at the same rate as life expectancy. Other countries showed differences between men and women: in the Netherlands men’s disability-free life expectancy increased faster than life expectancy but women’s disability-free life expectancy declined over the period, so Dutch women were living longer but the extra years were spent in poor health.

The main aim of EHEMU is to provide a central facility for the coordinated analysis and synthesis of life and health expectancies. The project teams are based at CRLC and the University of Montpellier, France; the University of Leicester, UK; the Scientific Institute of Public Health, Belgium; and the French National Institute of Demography, INED.

“We now have to explore the reasons for these differences through in-depth analyses,” said Professor Jagger. A number of factors could be responsible for the variations, such as smoking and diet, as well as the prevalence of diseases commonly resulting in disability, including stroke and coronary heart disease.

“The new EU structural indicator Healthy Life Years, which will be based on more comparable data, is an important step forward in monitoring the health of our ageing European populations for future planning,” she concluded.

Several research Framework Programme-funded projects are investigating the political implications of key social issues such as ageing and health. The AHEAD ‘Scientific Support to Policy’ project is gauging how an ageing population affects health care demand. Another, called HealthBASKET, is providing policy-makers with high-quality information to inform their decisions on health care services and costs across the Union. In addition, the EU-funded SHARE study presented its first detailed findings on health, ageing and retirement earlier this year. These are discussed in a coming Headlines story ‘Getting old: sharing the burden’.

Calorie restriction may promote brain longevity

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New York: Restricting calorie intake may prevent Alzheimer’s Disease by triggering activity in the brain associated with longevity, a study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine suggests.

The study, published in the July 2006 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, is the first to show that restricting caloric intake, specifically carbohydrates, may prevent Alzheimer’s.

Giulio Maria Pasinetti MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Nuroscience, Director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at the school says that lifestyle factors such as diet may be crucial to managing the diease.

She said: “This research, however, is the first to show a connection between nutrition and Alzheimer’s Disease neuropathy by defining mechanistic pathways in the brain and scrutinizing biochemical functions. We hope these findings further unlock the mystery of Alzheimer’s and bring hope to the millions of Americans suffering from this disease.”

Alzheimer’s is one of the most feared diseases of ageing and there are currently no cures. Although genetics are thought to be responsible for early onset, this is not the case in the most common form in later life.

People with Alzheimer’s have high levels of beta-amyloid peptides that cause plaque buildup in the brain – though this cannot be seen until after death. Beta-amyloid peptides activate SIRT1, a member of a broad family of proteins known as sirtuins which influence a variety of functions including metabolism and aging.

In the Mount Sinai study it was found that mice were subjected to dietary calorie restriction, based on low carbohydrates food, had reduced beta-amyloid peptides in the brain. Whilst a high caloric intake based on saturated fat was shown to increase levels of beta-amyloid peptides.

It is the first study to show that calorie restriction can promote SIRTI, a molecule associated with brain longevity, and may activate alpha-secretase which can prevent plaque build-up in the brain. study finds that a high caloric intake based on saturated fat promotes AD type beta-amyloidosis, while caloric restriction based on reduced carbohydrate intake is able to prevent it.

Among lifestyle factors influencing AD, recent studies strongly support the evidence that caloric intake may play a role in the relative risk for AD clinical dementia. Most importantly, as mechanistic pathways are defined and their biochemical functions scrutinized, the evidence supporting a direct link between nutrition and AD neuropathology continues to grow.

Women now live longer than men, even in the poorest countries

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Sheffield: 2006 is likely to be the first year in human history when – across almost all the world – women can expect to outlive men, say researchers in the current issue of the British Medical Journal.

The trend towards this remarkable achievement will probably be confirmed this week in the 2006 world health report.

“We tend to forget that in many countries of the world women could expect, until recently, to live fewer years than men and that maternal death in particular remains a big killer,” write Danny Dorling and colleagues. In Europe, men last outlived women in the Netherlands in 1860 and in Italy in 1889. Elsewhere females’ life expectancy has long exceeded males’: in Sweden since 1751, Denmark since 1835, England and Wales since 1841.

But in all western European countries the life expectancy gap between women and men is now narrowing.

Greater emancipation has freed women to demand better health care and to behave more like men, and most importantly to smoke, say the authors. As this transition is so recent, the processes driving it cannot be purely biological: they relate primarily to social change.

“We must remember, though, that life expectancy data apply from birth onwards, so the picture would be different in some countries if life expectancy from conception was considered,” they add. “But even the life expectancy from birth may not be a permanent achievement, given that the largest remaining untapped market for cigarettes in the world is made up of women living in poorer countries,” they conclude.

Click here to view full editorial: http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/april/edit808.pdf

More people will live to be 100, say experts

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London: Experts are predicting that more than a million people born in the UK and now aged 30 could live to be 100 years old and more.

Currently there are around 10,000 centenarians but this figure could grow to 1.2million by 2074. In effect this means that one in eight people could live to be 100 while thousands of others will live to be 110 or more, acccording to statistics from the UK Government’s Actuary Department.This spurt in longevity is attributed to better diet and medical care.

Improved diet and lifestyle, especially among the affluent, are also responsible. And the decline of heavy industry means that workers are far less likely to be exposed to the health risks and dangers or heavy machinery.

The increased use of cholesterollowering drugs in recent years has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Under new prescription guidance to GPs, up to one in ten adults could end up taking statins to prevent cardiovascular disease.

This could save 20,000 lives a year while some experts believe a quarter of Britons could end up taking the drugs for life.

Doctors now perform regular screening to detect diseases such as cervical cancer and the breakthrough of drugs such as herceptin to treat breast cancer are helping to keep the number of deaths down.

The eradication of many infectious diseases during the last century has had a huge impact.

Child immunisation, better sanitation and increased use of antibiotics have swept away most cases of smallpox, diphtheria and tuberculosis.

Britons are also more aware than ever of the benefits of taking regular exercise. This can help reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease, strokes and diabetes.

Countless studies have also shown that eating a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables can help control cholesterol and prevent some types of cancer.

The growth in longevity would also have a big impact on the size of the UK population as a whole, with the number of people living in the country growing to 75million by 2074 based on these figures.

The population could soar even higher, to 90million, if the highest projections for fertility rates and immigration are also factored in.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last year revealed big differences across the UK. People living in Scotland and the north of England came out worse, with the lowest life expectancy for both men and women found in Glasgow. In contrast those men living in the affluent area of Kensington and Chelsea in London enjoyed the longest lifespan, at 80.8 years – 11.5 years more than in Glasgow. Women in this area also had the longest life expectancy at 85.8 years, compared with 76.4 in Glasgow.

Longevity linked to happiness, says Carnegie Mellon research

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New York: There is growing evidence that positive emotions such as happiness are linked to good health and increased longevity, but too many questions remain unanswered to draw definitive conclusions, according to a review of research conducted over the past 10 years.

The paper, authored by Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Sarah Pressman, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Carnegie Mellon, was published in the December 12 issue of the Psychological Bulletin.

The strongest links between positive emotions and health were found in studies that examined “trait” emotions, which reflect a person’s typical emotional experience, rather than “state” emotions, which reflect momentary responses to events. People who typically report more positive emotions experience lower rates of chronic illness, symptoms and pain.

Moreover, among the elderly who live on their own or with family rather than in retirement homes, positive emotional dispositions are linked to living longer. In contrast, positive emotions are not associated with increased longevity in studies of other populations, and though possibly beneficial for recovery from less serious diseases, extremely positive emotions are in some cases associated with poorer outcomes among those with serious illness.

“Overall, the literature suggests an association between positive emotions and some measures of good health, but there are many subtle weaknesses in these studies and it would be inappropriate to make any strong conclusions,” Cohen said.

One problem in interpreting the literature is that in many cases, it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of positive and negative emotions. For example, do elderly living on their own or with family live longer because they are happy or because they are not sad? Interestingly, people’s experiences of positive and negative emotions are partly independent in some circumstances. For instance, in looking back over the last month or year, one can reasonably report having been both happy and sad. A definitive answer to whether positive or negative emotions are contributing to a health outcome can only come from studies that measure both types of emotions and examine their independent effects. Consequently, it is difficult to conclude from the existing literature whether happiness leads to a healthier and longer life or unhappiness results in a less healthy, shorter one.

The authors also were concerned with the possibility that some measures of positive emotions may themselves be direct indicators of physical health. For example, adjectives such as “energetic,” “full-of-pep,” and “vigorous” may reflect a positive mood, but may also reflect how healthy one feels. Self-rated health has been found to predict illness and longevity above and beyond objective health measures such as physician ratings. Consequently, it is important for future research to include standard measures of self-rated health to help exclude the possibility that researchers are merely predicting good objective health from good perceived health masquerading as positive emotions.

Cohen and Pressman suggest that future research focus on determining how emotions “get under the skin” to influence health. In other words, what behavioral or physiological changes do positive emotions trigger to ward off illness? The authors propose that emotions can have a direct impact on health; for example, they may influence lifestyle choices, or the function of the immune and autonomic nervous systems. Alternatively, they suggest that positive emotions may also influence health by mitigating the harmful effects of stress.

“Overall, we consider this literature provocative but not definitive. It does not unequivocally indicate that positive emotions are beneficial for health, but instead suggests a more divergent view of when positive emotions may have positive, negative or no effects,” Cohen said.

Exercise helps longevity

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Rotterdam: Regular exercise that keeps you fit can prolong life by up to four years, according to new research from the University of Erasmus.

Researchers examined the medical records of 5,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans to discover that those who took moderate exercise on a regular basis lived 1.3 to 3.7 years longer than those who didn’t take any. Those who took part in strenuous daily exercise such as jogging increased their lifespan still further from 3.5 years to 3.7 years. The findings are published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Oscar Franco, one of the researchers said: “This shows that physical activity really does make a difference – not only for how long you live but for how long you live a healthy life.”

The effects of how low, moderate or high levels of physical activity, affected lifespan were calculated, taking into account age, sex, whether people smoked or had health problems.

Get checked out with the experts

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Each year more than a million people die from old age. Experts in the field of anti-ageing medicine, are at the fore-front of what is actually preventative medicine. Most ageing diseases are caused by lifestyle – things that we do to ourselves either by a poor diet, lack of exercise, too much alcohol or smoking. The world’s leading anti-ageing experts are here.

Starting with a simple blood test medical specialists can determine what diet and supplements you need to look better from the inside out and help you live a better quality of life for longer. Other experts can assist with motivation and feelings, cosmetic surgery and rejuvenation.

Mediterranean diet extends life

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A Mediterranean-style diet can extend the average life by a year, according to experts at the University of Athens Medical School.

Eating fruit, vegetables, fish and olive oil together with an occasional glass of wine and a low consumption of diary and meat, can contribute to longevity.

The findings are based on a study of 74,000 men and women in nine European countries and found that a healthy man of 60 who followed the diet could expect to live a year longer than one of the same age who ate differently.

The conclusion endorses the findings of previous research in which the Mediterranean diet is responsible for a lower risk of death from heart disease and cancer, the biggest killer diseases in the developed world.

Analysis of the findings showed those who followed the Mediterranean-diet quite closely were less likely to be among the group who died.

The Greeks were found to adhere most closely to the Mediterranean diet followed by the Spanish, Italians and French.

The British were fifth – ahead of the Danes, the Germans, the Swedes and the Dutch, who came last.

Britons prepared to give up sex for longevity, says new survey

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LONDON: A large number of Britons would be prepared to give up sex if it meant they would live to be 100, according to a survey on Friday.

The Mori research found that 40 percent would pass on the passion for longevity, although far more women (48 percent) were willing to make the sacrifice than men (31 percent).

However nearly all (94 percent) would not give up their friends or family in order to reach their century while a half thought scientists should keep trying to prolong people’s lifespans.

Private health care provider BUPA commissioned the survey as part of a debate on the implications of an ageing population.

“Britain is facing an ageing time bomb with major challenges presented by retirement, the desire to live longer and the increasing burden of caring for older people,” said Andrew Vallance-Owen, BUPA’s medical director.

World’s oldest woman found in Chechnya

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At 124 years old Zabina Khakimova has been declared the world’s oldest person – and she still does the housework.

Zabina puts her longevity down to hard work, simple food and clean mountain air. Perhaps it also helps that she prays five times a day.

Whatever the secret, Zabani Khakimova was yesterday declared to be the world’s oldest living person at 124.

According to authorities in her native Chechnya, she remains in good health and continues to do housework and even a little babysitting for her huge extended family.

Mrs Khakimova, who lives in the Achkoi-Martan district of the mountainous and war-ravaged Russian republic, has 24 grandchildren, 38 greatgrandchildren and seven great-great grandchildren.

The claim the Chechens are making for her age would make her nine years older than the oldest person cited by the Guinness Book of Records, Kamato Kongo, from Japan, who is 115. She would even exceed the age reached by Jeanne Calment, the oldest ever person to be authenticated by the book’s researchers, who died in France in 1997 aged 122.

Assuming the claim is genuine, Mrs Khakimova has witnessed a century and a quarter of war, famine and revolution. She has lived under three Tsars and was 38 by the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Since then she has seen her country convulsed by more than 70 years of Communism followed by a decade of civil war. She endured the mass deportation of her people to Kazakhstan in Central Asia in 1942 after the Chechens were accused by Stalin of collaboration with invading Nazi troops.

Thousands had died of hunger and disease before they were allowed to return after Stalin’s death, by which time Mrs Khakimova had lost her husband and eight of her ten children.

More recently she has witnessed the appalling devastation that followed Chechnya’s declaration of independence in 1992 and the Russian invasion that followed. Thousands of people died in the ensuing fighting.

Her home town witnessed the terrors of war with separatist troops planting mines and shooting at Russian soldiers, who in turn are accused of mistreating civilians as they hunted down guerikas.! Doctors who have examined Mrs Khakimova say she is in good health considering her age. Her only complaint has been a problem with her hearing over the pastcouple of years.

Her memory is not what it once was, course, and while insisting that she was indeed born in 1879, the Chechens have failed to pin down an actual date of birth.

Her youngest son, Mokhdan, is still alive and has ten children of his own. Another son, Akhdan, died just two years ago but is survived by his 14 children.

Mrs Khakimova’s life is said to have revolved around raising her children and growing vegetables for food.

These days, as well as working around the house, she looks after her great! grandchildren and great-great grandchildren, and never misses her prayer sessions.

The claim for her age was made by the Chechen deputy health minister Sultan Alimkhadzhiyev to a Russian news agency.
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It would put her way ahead of Kamati Kongo, who”was born on September 1 1887, on Tokunoshima Island, Japan and who took the title aged 114 year and 183 days on the death of American Maude Farris-Luse in March 2002.

Mrs Farris-Luse had credited intake of boiled dandelion greens a fried fish for her longevity.

Last night a spokesman for the Guinness Book of Records said the Chech claim had not yet reached them.

“But if they can send us a birth certificate, medical records or witness sta ments backing up the claim we will investigate it,’ she added.

If official doubts were to be cast Mrs Khakimova’s age, it would not the first time in recent years that Russian longevity proclamations have be discredited.

In January 2001 the southern Russin republic of Dagestan reported that tl world’s oldest man, 134-year-old Gayirkhan Iriskhanov, lived in a local village. Then a Russian census December last year found that a Siberian woman, Pelageya Zakurdayeva, was born on June 6, 1886, making her the longest-living person in the world at 111.

Humans could live 5000 years say scientists

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Blame it on boomers – people born between 1946 and 1965. The baby boom generation now makes up more than a quarter of the US population population -some 77.5 million people, with more than 160,000 in San Diego. One-third are over age 50.

Every seven seconds, another boomer joins that group. In just seven years, the first boomers will hit official retirement age. By 2030, boomers 65 and older will represent one in every five people.

For them, 65 will be the new 45. Or so they hope, and so many claim.

From self-described anti-aging institutes to miracle elixirs to how-to manuals for living a century or more, boomers (and just about everyone else) want to live longer than those in previous generations.

These days, the average American has a life expectancy of 76.9 years — a little more for females, a little less for males.

Most people, of course, want to live much longer than the average. But what are the odds of living to the century mark and beyond? And how much beyond is possible?

The good news is that most scientists think human life expectancies can be substantially stretched. The not-so-good news, some experts say, is that the estimated maximum human life span — about 125 years — seems fairly fixed and that most of us will never get close.

“Longevity is really a modern phenomenon,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer and biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10, usually from infectious diseases.

“We’ve done fabulous things to boost the survival rates of the young — improved sanitation, new medicines — but now it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s not so easy to add 70 years of life to somebody who’s already 70 years old.”

No doubt. But a number of scientists and doctors think it’s too early to start talking about a “finished” line. They assert, in principle, that there is no maximum human life span.

Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist at the University of Cambridge in England, says that under the right circumstances, humans born in the 22nd century (just 96 years away) could live up to 5,000 years.

De Grey, who advocates using technology to develop a “true cure for aging,” is indisputably at the optimistic extreme. But plenty of others see longer lives ahead.

“I think people will someday live substantially longer than today,” said Steven Austad, a biologist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. “(Living) into your 100s will be fairly routine, up to 150 for the outlier (a longer-lived person who is the exception to the rule). I think this because we have been so successful at figuring out how to make animals live longer.

“The arguments (against appreciably longer life spans),” he added, “are based so far as I can tell on ignoring a huge pile of research done over the past 15 years and the mystical belief that longevity, unlike every other human trait we know of, is impossible to change.”

Wear and tear

In biological terms, aging is usually defined as the accumulation of random damage to the building blocks of life, most notably DNA. The damage starts in early childhood and accelerates after age 30 or 40.

Over time, the accrued, unfixed damage impairs bodily functions. Cells, tissues, organs and systems work less well.

The immune system of a typical 65-year-old, for example, is only one-tenth as effective as that of a teenager. With less protection comes greater vulnerability to disease.

“Aging, in our view, makes us ever more susceptible to such ills as heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and cancer,” Olshansky wrote, along with Leonard Hayflick, a gerontologist at the University of California San Francisco, and Bruce A. Carnes, a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, in an online essay published this year by Scientific American magazine.

But conditions like heart disease are age-related, not the actual equivalent of aging, the scientists note. And aging is not the same as longevity.

Even if modern medicine could eradicate all the leading causes of death among the elderly, says Hayflick, an early pioneer in gerontology research, human life expectancy would increase no more than 15 years.

People would still age, he said. Other afflictions would rise up to exact their deadly toll. The maximum human life span would remain unchanged.

Age-old questions

If scientists want to boost that maximum life expectancy of about 125 years, most experts say, they’ve first got to solve the questions of how we age and why.

All organisms age, but the process, called senescence, is variable and, in some species such as the giant tortoise and rougheye rockfish, it’s virtually negligible.

The tortoise is known to live for 150 years or more; the rockfish more than two centuries. Both exhibit almost no signs of aging.

Variable senescence among species suggests to researchers that there are biological mechanisms, as yet undiscovered or understood, that might be altered, replaced or removed to effectively slow or even reverse aging in humans.

De Grey at the University of Cambridge says biotechnology is the answer.

He thinks current and foreseeable medical technologies, from drugs that repair or prevent cellular damage to organ regeneration and replacement, may soon be able to reverse the effects of aging. He predicts that researchers will actually do so in mice during this decade.

“Intervention to remove the accumulating damage . . . has the potential to postpone aging indefinitely,” he said.

A big key will be genes, which researchers say dictate and exert influence over roughly 30 percent of the aging process.

“As we begin to learn more about genetics, we see that there perhaps are certain genes that enable people to cope better with stress, react better to hormones and possibly regulate the rate of aging,” said Dr. Robert Butler, president of the International Longevity Center-USA, a New York City-based think tank.

Scientists are pushing hard to find such genes.

In 2001, Harvard University physicians and molecular biologists conducted tests on people who were all at least 90 years old and found they shared one or two genes on a specific chromosome. The exact function of these genes, however, has not been determined.

More recently, Olshansky and colleagues have launched a global project to identify so-called longevity genes by sampling DNA from exceptionally elderly people in places where very long life spans are common, such as Okinawa, Japan; the Vilcabamba valley in Ecuador; and the Hunza region of Pakistan.

Such efforts, though, won’t mean more birthdays for everyone anytime soon.

Most researchers are skeptical that there will ever be a one- stop genetic remedy. They note that aging involves lots of other factors, not to mention the considerable ethical and social issues attached to significantly modifying the human genome.

“Is the purpose of medicine and biotechnology, in principle, to let us live endless, painless lives of perfect bliss?,” the President’s Council on Bioethics asked in a report last year. “Or is their purpose rather to let us live out the humanly full span of life within the edifying limits and constraints of humanity’s grasp and power?”

The council expressed concern that a world full of centenarians and a diminished sense of mortality might result in problems no one can imagine or resolve.

Others suggest that such worries miss a more pertinent point.

Tom Perls, a geriatrician who runs the New England Centenarian Study, says most people are already genetically well-equipped to live reasonably healthy lives well into their 80s. The only requirement: They take good care of themselves.

Dr. Dilip V. Jeste, director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UCSD, agrees.

“The obstacles over which we have control (of aging) are primarily environmental and behavioral,” Jeste said. “These include smoking, use of drugs of abuse as well as excessive alcohol, sedentary habits, poor nutrition, etc.

“The prevention of hypertension, diabetes and obesity may help increase life span significantly,” he said. “Resilience, optimism, adaptation to changing circumstances and optimal coping style are also important.”

Jeste said the focus of aging science should be less about extending life spans and more about making aging a “successful process associated not only with longevity, but also with a high level of activity of brain and mind.”

The record for the longest documented life is held by Jean Calment, who died in France in 1997. She was 122. The last years, however, were not kind. She was blind, deaf, incontinent and unable to care for herself.

Quantity wasn’t quality, and Calment most likely longed for the youth of her 90s.