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Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2021 8:02 am
by wjfox
Israeli scientists extend mice’s lives by 23%, say method may work on humans

Mice not only live longer, but are more youthful and less susceptible to cancer, after team from Bar Ilan University and US National Institutes of Health boosts a single protein

1 June 2021, 7:42 am

Israeli scientists have boosted the life expectancy of mice by 23 percent, in an advance they hope could eventually be replicated in humans.

They increased the supply of a protein, SIRT6, which normally wanes with aging, in 250 mice. In peer-reviewed research just published in the journal Nature Communications, they have revealed the increased life expectancy — and also stated that the protein-rich mice were more youthful and less susceptible to cancer.

“The change in life expectancy is significant, when you consider that an equivalent jump in human life expectancy would have us living on average until almost 120,” said Prof. Haim Cohen of Bar-Ilan University.

[...]

In 2012 Cohen became the first researcher to to actually increase levels in animals and increase life expectancy, and in doing so cause male mice to live 15% longer. But that experiment had no impact on female mice.

In the latest research — a collaboration between international scientists including Prof. Rafael de Cabo from the US National Institutes of Health — the jump in life expectancy was seen among both male and female mice. It is bigger among the male mice, who are now living 30% longer than males from the control group. The female mice are living 15% longer than their control group counterparts.

Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-s ... on-humans/

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2021 2:24 pm
by wjfox
New study finds most adults would not take a life extension pill, even if it existed

By Douglas Heingartner
June 6, 2021

A new study of about 900 U.S. adults has found that only 33% would use a hypothetical life extension treatment that would allow them “to live forever,” even if it were available today. About 42% said they would not use it, and 25% said they were unsure.

[...]

The 911 participants consisted of three age groups: 593 young adults (aged 18 – 29, average age 20, recruited from a U.S. university), a group of 272 “younger” seniors (average age 72) recruited via senior centers and church groups, and a third group of 46 “older” seniors (average age 88) recruited in the same way.

The researchers asked the participants three questions. One was “If doctors developed a pill that enabled you to live forever at your current age, would you take it?” The possible answers were yes, no, or unsure. The second question was “What is the youngest age at which you would be willing to live forever?” and the third was “What is the oldest age at which you would be willing to live forever?”

[...]

The overall differences between the three age groups were small. Among young adults, 34% said yes, 40% said no, and 26% were unsure. For the younger seniors, 32% said yes, 43% said no, and 25% were unsure. And among the group of older seniors, 24% said yes, 59% said no, and 17% indicated they were unsure.

[...]

But the researchers did find a large difference between the three age groups in terms of the youngest and oldest age at which they would be willing to live forever. For young adults, the youngest age at which they would like to “freeze” the aging process and then live forever was 23, and the oldest age was 42.

https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/new-stud ... t-existed/

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2021 4:59 pm
by Ken_J
There is a part of me that feels like I'm okay with half the population not choosing to live an extended life. I mean there are plenty of people who have had strokes and heart attacks and yet choose not to give up fatty food, cigarettes and drinking. There are those who would arm themselves with guns and try to kidnap government officials because they think the government is faking a pandemic to try and get 5g microchips implanted into people. If these blithering nitwits feel unwilling to take the option to have an indefinite future I'm sure not going to force the rest of humanity to work one iota more to convince them otherwise.

And yet at the same time I've faced some pain and sickness recently and some minor depression that can really make one feel like like really is a long string of injuries (physical, mental and emotional) acquired one after another until you can no longer recover and then just a lingering demise. And the idea of that sort of pain and misery, over and over again without end... is literally describing hell as most people envision it.

But I think that in part the results of this survey are due to how the question is asked.

If it instead asked the participants if they were offered medical therapies that prevented heart disease, mental declines, thinning bones, arthritis, vision and hearing loss, and could allow them to eat like they used to eat when younger... and the therapies were easy and quick to take and lasted a decade each... how many would they take in the future? When would be a good time to stop taking them?

I think part of the problem is that we frame it as an active choice, and the consequences are made to sound infinite. In a world where many people have lived lives slaving away for companies that destroy the world without checks while we are beaten down for demanding authority stop murdering our fellow citizens in the streets with impunity. That the summers will become impossibly hotter each year, with increased droughts. more pandemics will emerge, along with economic recessions, depressions, famines, and wars. That feels like an awful lot to sign up for over and over again for all time.

It's why I prefer to flip the framing. Asking myself and others, if you could prevent the symptoms of aging until the end of your life, when would you chose to die. Cuz given the passive choice to keep playing games, reading books, trying new recipes, walking with friends, playing some sport, seeing movies, learning new things... etc. people will almost always just keep doing things. They don't want to choose to stop it all.

I think the result would vary greatly if we framed the questions differently.

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
by wjfox

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:05 pm
by Time_Traveller
Is 150 years really the limit of human lifespan?
Thursday 10 Jun 2021

While most of us can expect to live to around 80, some people defy expectations and live to be over 100. In places such as Okinawa, Japan and Sardinia, Italy, there are many centenarians. The oldest person in history — a French woman named Jeanne Calment — lived to 122. When she was born in 1875, the average life expectancy was roughly 43.

But just how long could a human actually live? It’s a question people have been asking for centuries. While average life expectancy (the number of years a person can expect to live) is relatively easy to calculate, maximum lifespan estimates (the greatest age a human could possibly reach) are much harder to make. Previous studies have placed this limit close to 140 years of age. But a more recent study proposes that the limit to human lifespan is closer to 150.

Calculating lifespan

The oldest and still most widely used method for calculating life expectancy, and thus lifespan, relies on the Gompertz equation. This is the observation, first made in the 19th century, that human death rates from disease increase exponentially with time. Essentially, this means your chance of death — from cancer, heart disease and many infections, for example — roughly doubles every eight to nine years.

There are many ways the formula can be tweaked to account for how different factors (such as sex or disease) affect the lifespan within a population. Gompertz calculations are even used to calculate health insurance premiums — which is why these companies are so interested in whether you smoke, whether you are married and anything else that might allow them to more accurately judge the age at which you will die.

Another approach to figuring out how long we can live is to look at how our organs decline with age, and run that rate of decline against the age at which they stop working. For example, eye function and how much oxygen we use while exercising show a general pattern of decline with ageing, with most calculations indicating organs will only function until the average person is around 120 years old.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/06/10/is-150-y ... i=14745298

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:59 pm
by weatheriscool
It will all come down to repairing the body and renewing the cells. Sure, cells and organs without this could only last 150 years but regeneration could allow for thousands of years.

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2021 9:11 am
by wjfox
Could ‘super-agers’ help explain how we get old?

Beryl Voss is 88-years-old and is still very active - going hiking on a regular basis and volunteering twice a week at a food hall to help people who are hungry.

She is also part of a study to find out why people like her have aged well and what scientists can learn from her.

BBC Click’s James Clayton finds out more.



Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2021 2:54 am
by weatheriscool
Age Resetting Genes Going to Human Studies in Two Years
June 8, 2021 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/06/a ... years.html
David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan.

Nature – Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice
Sinclair and his team restored vision in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. They are now working to rejuvenate the brains of old mice. This work is so promising that Sinclair believes he can get to human trials within two years. Sinclair is using three genes to reset the age of cells.

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2021 4:58 pm
by weatheriscool
Convergent mechanism of aging discovered
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-convergen ... aging.html
by Max Planck Society
Several different causes of aging have been discovered, but the question remains whether there are common underlying mechanisms that determine aging and lifespan. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing research at the University Cologne have now come across folate metabolism in their search for such basic mechanisms. Its regulation underlies many known aging signaling pathways and leads to longevity. This may provide a new possibility to broadly improve human health during aging.

In recent decades, several cellular signaling pathways have been discovered that regulate the lifespan of an organism and are thus of enormous importance for aging research. When researchers altered these signaling pathways, this extended the lifespan of diverse organisms. However, the question arises whether these different signaling pathways converge on common metabolic pathways that are causal for longevity.

Re: Aging & Longevity News and Discussions

Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 6:30 pm
by weatheriscool
Anti-aging protein in red blood cells helps stave off cognitive decline

by Public Library of Science
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... cells.html
Research conducted by Qiang et al has discovered a link between a protein in red blood cells and age-related decline in cognitive performance. Published in the open access journal PLOS Biology on 17th June 2021, the study shows that depleting mouse blood of the protein ADORA2B leads to faster declines in memory, delays in auditory processing, and increased inflammation in the brain.

As life expectancies around the world increase, so are the number of people who will experience age-related cognitive decline. Because the amount of oxygen in the blood also declines with age, the team hypothesized that aging in the brain might be naturally held at bay by adenosine receptor A2B (ADORA2B), a protein on the membrane of red blood cells which is known to help release oxygen from the blood cells so it can be used by the body. To test this idea, they created mice that lacked ADORA2B in their blood and compared behavioral and physiological measures with control mice.