Aging and Longevity
purepedantry | August 27, 2008There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi.
Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the life span of nematodes, yeast and most recently mice (though the mice in that study were on an unhealthy high calorie diet). Explaining how these compounds work is a more difficult challenge. We think that these compounds work by influencing pathways that regulate overall metabolism. We also think that these same pathways are altered by caloric-restriction -- a technique that…
purepedantry | February 5, 2008The average age of the world population is getting older, and this is very likely to have serious social and economic consequences in the countries and regions where it is most severe. However, I feel like this is very rarely discussed in politics. Politics seems to be rather specialized at not discussing the issues that are most likely to be relevant.
Anyway, I caught two articles on the aging population in the last week, and in honor of Super Tuesday I thought we should discuss the demographic trend that is most likely to shape the world over the next 100 years.
The first is by Lutz et…
purepedantry | January 4, 2007This is the question that I get all the time in family gatherings. Well, maybe not in those words. Usually it is phrased as "How can I not get Alzheimer's? Because that would be a bummer...for me..."
People are concerned about the issue of cognitive decline with aging -- both with pathological decline such as Alzheimer's disease and your normal "I can't find my keys" declines. Numerous popular remedies exist that purport to improve your chances of staying with it longer, such as doing crossword puzzles or running ten miles a day for your entire life.
In the late 90s, the National…
purepedantry | August 31, 2006I have posted before about how I think that the role of genetics, at least in popular culture, has been overemphasized. Rather, the really interesting and important parts of genetics are the ways in which your genes interact with environmental factors.
There is an excellent article in the NY Times today about how longevity has a lot less to do with genes than people think. To wit:
The scientific view of what determines a life span or how a person ages has swung back and forth. First, a couple of decades ago, the emphasis was on environment, eating right, exercising, getting good medical…