Archive for the 'Life Extension' Category
January 16th, 2009 -- Posted in Life Extension |
Bing Ren, Ph.D., associate professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and head of the Laboratory of Gene Regulation at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, was recently selected as one of four grant recipients in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap’s Epigenomics Program, an initiative developed to study stable genetic modifications that affect and alter the behavior of genes across the human genome.
The five-year, $16.6 million grant will support The San Diego Epigenome Center at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UC San Diego, one of four centers in the country called Reference Epigenome Mapping Centers (REMC) as part of an overall five-year, $190 million NIH program. Ren’s grant will support interdisciplinary work to comprehensively map elements of the human epigenome, which Ren describes as “like an added dimension to the DNA string.”
“The human epigenome is the next frontier of genomic research,” said Ren. “Just as the Human Genome Project provided a picture of the sequence of genomes, our work will help create a map of the processes that impact gene regulation – what turns genes on and off – in order to improve our understanding of what drives human development and disease.”
The epigenome plays a pivotal role in cellular differentiation, tissue formation and aging by regulating the transcriptional potential of the genome, specifying when and where genes are activated or expressed. Epigenetic processes, such as modifications to DNA-associated proteins called histones, control genetic activity by changing the three-dimensional structure of chromosomes. Diet and exposure to environmental chemicals throughout all stages of human development, among other factors, can cause such epigenetic changes that may turn on or turn off certain genes.
Source: UCSD Health http://health.ucsd.edu/news/2009/1-13-epigenome-grant.htm
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September 30th, 2008 -- Posted in Life Extension, Mental Health |
Nearly 60 percent of the nation’s elderly have trouble sleeping, whether it’s a lot of tossing and turning or outright bouts of insomnia. While for most people sleeplessness can be annoying at best or unhealthy at worst, for elderly individuals who have suffered from depression in the past, poor sleep may be the first sign that a new bout of depression is coming on.
In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry and currently available online, UCLA professor of psychiatry Dr. Michael Irwin and his colleagues posed three hypotheses: risk for depression would be higher among older people with a prior history of the disorder; among those with prior depression, sleep disturbance could predict a relapse or recurrence; and sleep disturbances could act as a risk factor for depression recurrence separate from other depressive symptoms. The study confirmed all three hypotheses.
“Insomnia is the most frequent sleep disturbance in depressed patients and is viewed as a symptom of current depression,” said Irwin, who also directs the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “But when sleep disturbances begin to emerge in an otherwise healthy adult who has experienced depression in the past, we found that it may serve as a precursor to another attack of depression.”
The study looked at 351 adults, age 60 and older. Of that number, 145 had a prior history of major or non-major depression that was in full remission, while 206 had no prior history of depression or other mental illness. The participants were assessed at four different times over a two-year period for depressive episodes, depressive symptoms, sleep quality and chronic medical disease.
The researchers found that of the subjects with prior depression, 23 had a relapse, compared with only one person in the group without prior mental illness. With the first group, researchers were able to predict depression recurrence based on individuals’ sleep disturbance. Irwin noted that this association was established independently of other depressive symptoms, chronic medical disease or any use of antidepressants.
The study, Irwin said, is the first to demonstrate that sleep disturbances act as an independent risk factor for depression recurrence in older adults.
“Unfortunately, sleep difficulties are often considered to be a part of normal aging, and asking about and assessing the quality of an older person’s sleep is frequently overlooked during routine doctor visits,” Irwin said. “The omission is particularly striking, since we know that sleep disturbance is associated with declines in health functioning and with increases in all causes of mortality in older adults.
“And now, this study shows that sleep disturbance is often related to depressive disorders in late life, which carry further considerable risks for morbidity and mortality.”
To identify older adults at risk for depression, Irwin said, a two-step strategy can be employed. One step involves assessment of whether individuals have had a prior episode of depression, the other whether they have current and ongoing sleep disturbance.
“Given that sleep disturbance is a modifiable risk factor,” he said, “these findings tell us that we need to develop treatments that target sleep disturbances for the prevention of depression recurrence in older adults.”
In addition to Irwin, other authors of the study included Hyong Jin Cho, M.D., Ph.D.; Helen Lavretsky, M.D.; Richard Olmstead, Ph.D.; Myron J. Levin, M.D.; and Michael N. Oxman, M.D.
Levin reports receiving funds from pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc. The other authors report no competing interests.
Funding for the study was provided by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health; and the Cooperative Studies Program of the U.S. Veteran’s Affairs Office of Research and Development.
Source: UCLA Newsroom, Mark Wheeler (http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/restless-nights-puts-older-adults-64185.aspx)
August 20th, 2008 -- Posted in Life Extension, Physical Health |
Number of uninsured, rising costs, long term care and an aging population could force a major system overhaul, says leading health economist
Aug. 20, 2008 — “We are headed into a time when a confluence of changes are going to lead to a perfect storm, making us finally realize that our health care system needs a major overhaul,” says Timothy D. McBride, Ph.D., leading health economist and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
“As the elderly population doubles between now and about 2030, projections are that we will see at least a doubling of the costs of the federal and state health and retirement programs,” he says. “That will likely be when the perfect storm hits. But if we miss it then, we will likely have missed all the storm clouds for the foreseeable future.”
McBride is available to discuss the current state of health care in the U.S. as well as the presidential candidates’ health care plans. Washington University in St. Louis is the site of this year’s vice presidential debate.
Familiar trends associated with the current health care crisis are the high rate of uninsured Americans and rising health care costs. The number of ever-rising uninsured is 47 million or about 16% of the U.S. population. National health expenditures exceed $2 trillion, accounting for 16% of the U.S. economy — more than three times the share health care took in 1960.
“While attention focuses on these two major trends, other storm clouds are brewing,” McBride says. “A long term care crisis looms, grows, and receives little attention, despite problems with the affordability, quality and access to long term care. These problems will only become much worse as the aging population doubles by 2030.
“Much attention also has been paid to the problems of financing Social Security, but the financial problems of the Social Security program pale in comparison to the burden of the Medicare and Medicaid programs on our economy.”
According to McBride, the growth of the elderly population will heighten concerns about the workforce needs in health care. “There are already shortages of nurses, and open nursing positions are sometimes filled by the expensive practice of recruiting migrant nurses into communities,” he says. “Added to this problem now are reports of shortages of other health professionals, including therapists, social workers, health aides and even some categories of physicians.
“Overall, we continue to worry about the general quality of health care as well as the problems of health disparities, as the inequities of our economy and culture flow into the health care system.”
Source: Washington University in St. Louis, Jessica Martin (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/12183.html)
August 18th, 2008 -- Posted in Brain Food, Life Extension, Osteoporosis / Bone Health, Physical Health |
Researchers at Johns Hopkins are reporting what is believed to be the most conclusive evidence to date that inadequate levels of vitamin D, obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, lead to substantially increased risk of death.
In a study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine online Aug. 11, the Johns Hopkins team analyzed a diverse sample of 13,000 initially healthy men and women participating in an ongoing national health survey and compared the risk of death between those with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D to those with higher amounts. An unhealthy deficiency, experts say, is considered blood levels of 17.8 nanograms per milliliter or lower.
Of the 1,800 study participants known to have died by Dec. 31, 2000, nearly 700 died from some form of heart disease, with 400 of these being deficient in vitamin D. This translates overall to an estimated 26 percent increased risk of any death, though the number of deaths from heart disease alone was not large enough to meet scientific criteria to resolve that it was due to low vitamin D levels.
Yet researchers say the finding does highlight a trend, with other studies linking shortages of vitamin D to increased rates of breast cancer and depression in the elderly. And earlier published findings by the team, from the same national study, have established a possible tie-in, showing an 80 percent increased risk of peripheral artery disease from vitamin D deficits.
Researchers note that other studies in the last year or so in animals and humans have identified a connection between low levels of vitamin D and heart disease. But these studies, they say, were weakened by small sample numbers, lack of diversity in the population studied and other factors that limited scientists’ ability to generalize the findings to the public at large.
“Our results make it much more clear that all men and women concerned about their overall health should more closely monitor their blood levels of vitamin D, and make sure they have enough,” said study co-lead investigator Erin Michos.
“We think we have additional evidence to consider adding vitamin D deficiency as a distinct and separate risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease, putting it alongside much better known and understood risk factors such as age, gender, family history, smoking, high blood cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity and diabetes,” she said.
Vitamin D is well-known to play an essential role in cell growth, in boosting the body’s immune system and in strengthening bones.
“Now that we know vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor, we can better assess how aggressively to treat people at risk of heart disease or those who are already ill and undergoing treatment,” said Michos, who added that test screening for nutrient levels is relatively simple. It can, she said, be made part of routine blood work and be done while monitoring other known risk factors, including blood pressure, glucose and lipid levels.
Heart disease remains the nation’s leading cause of death, killing more than a million Americans each year. Nearly 10 percent of those with the condition have not one identifiable, traditional risk factor, which the experts say is why a considerable extent of the disease goes unexplained.
Michos, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart and Vascular Institute, recommends that people boost their vitamin D levels by eating diets rich in such fish as sardines and mackerel, consuming fortified dairy products, taking cod-liver oil and vitamin supplements and in warmer weather briefly exposing skin to the sun’s vitamin D — producing ultraviolet light.
Aware of the cancer risks linked to too much time spent in the sun, Michos says that as little as 10 to 15 minutes of daily exposure to the sun can produce sufficient amounts of vitamin D to sustain health. The hormonelike nutrient controls blood levels of calcium and phosphorus, essential chemicals in the body.
Michos says that if vitamin supplements are used, there is no evidence that more than 2,000 international units per day do any good. Study results show that heart disease death rates flattened out in participants with the highest vitamin D levels (above 50 nanograms per milliliter of blood), signaling a possible loss of the vitamin’s protective effects at too-high doses.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine suggests that an adequate daily intake of vitamin D is between 200 and 400 international units (or blood levels nearing 30 nanograms per milliliter). Previous results from the same nationwide survey showed that 41 percent of men and 53 percent of women are technically deficient in the nutrient, with vitamin D levels below 28 nanograms per milliliter.
Michal Melamed, study co-lead investigator, who started the research as a clinical fellow at Johns Hopkins, says that no one knows yet why or how vitamin D’s hormonelike properties may protect the heart, but she adds that there are plenty of leads in the better known links the vitamin has to problems with muscle overgrowth and high blood pressure, in addition to its control of inflammation, which scientists are showing plays a stronger role in all kinds of heart disease. But more research is needed to determine the nutrient’s precise biological action.
Researchers say their next steps are to test various high doses of vitamin D to find out if the nutritional supplementation results in fewer deaths and lower incidence of heart disease, including heart attack or moments of prolonged and severe chest pain.
The team also plans to investigate what biological triggers, such as obesity or hypertension, might offset or worsen the action of vitamin D on heart muscle, or whether vitamin D sets off some other reaction in the heart.
Melamed says that because vitamin D levels are known to fluctuate in direct proportion with daily physical activity, the growing epidemic of obesity and indoor sedentary lifestyles lend more urgency to act on the vitamin D factor.
Funding for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, P.J. Schafer Cardiovascular Research Fund and Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars in Aging Program. Michos has received previous consulting fees from vitamin D therapeutics manufacturer Abbott Pharmaceuticals. The terms of these arrangements are being managed by The Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
Other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in this study, conducted solely at Johns Hopkins, were Wendy Post and Brad Astor. Melamed is now an assistant professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.
Source: John Hopkins Medicine, David March (http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2008/18aug08/18vitamind.html)
August 15th, 2008 -- Posted in Arthritis / Joint Pain, Life Extension, Osteoporosis / Bone Health, Physical Health |
Jogging regularly into old age may have more benefits than a simple runner’s high — the healthy habit may slow the effects of aging, according to a Stanford study two decades in the making.
In 1984, Emeritus Prof. of Medicine James Fries came up with a hypothesis called Compression of Morbidity, which holds that healthy lifestyles will not only prolong survival, but will also decrease the number of years with disability. He gathered a team of researchers and began his experiment.
The study started with around 1,000 people over the age of 50. Half of the participants were members of a runner’s club, and the other half were otherwise healthy people from Stanford, but not members of the running club. For 21 years up until 2005, the participants rated their disability status on a scale of 0 (no severe health problems at all) to 3 (pretty much unable to do most things).
“Everybody reported increasing disability as they get older, especially since we’re talking about people who were around 60 when they started,” said Prof. of Medicine Eliza Chakravarty. “However, we found that over time, the runners group had very low levels of disability that increased very slowly. The controls, on the other hand, had disability that increased much more quickly. At the end of the study, the difference between the disability levels was very dramatic.”
Participants who were part of a runner’s club also enjoyed lower mortality rates — about half that of the non-participants.
“So not only were they less disabled, but they lived longer as well,” Chakravarty said of the running participants.
One difficulty in this study was getting rid of self-selection bias — the possibility that factors other than running contributed to the experimental results. According to Fries, it was a highly plausible explanation that a positive, healthy attitude — rather than running — produced better outcomes. The research team tried to minimize the self-selection bias in several ways.
“We statistically adjusted for many factors such as obesity and age,” Chakravarty said. “We also chose pretty healthy people in our control group. They were not obese, had normal body weight, had the same education levels as the runners and didn’t drink or smoke much. We tried to restrict it so that the main difference between the two groups was running.”
The basic message of the study, however, is simple: Exercising, at any age, is very important.
“People shouldn’t be discouraged from exercising because they’re older,” Chakravarty said. “Adopting an exercising program — even in the 50s or 60s will be beneficial down the road. We’re just really excited that we’re able to show benefits of exercise, not only in living longer, but living healthier up into the 80s.”
Of course, swimmers, bikers and other exercise fiends need not fret over the study’s emphasis on running; other forms of cardiovascular exercise serve a similar purpose.
“We think it’s probably vigorous exercise in general [that produce these results],” Chakravarty said. “Even though we chose the groups for running and non-running, we don’t necessarily think that there is anything specific to running — that running is better than cycling or swimming or any other form of regular aerobic exercise.”
Source:The Stanford Daily, Melanie Kim (http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2008/8/14/studyFindsExerciseKeyToAgingWellLivingLong)
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