Aging News

"Aging & Longevity Research News" newsletter,
first issue

Greetings,

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new "Aging & Longevity Research News" newsletter. Please see below the first experimental issue of this newsletter, which contains the list of news with links to original publications.

If you are interested to see the most recent news everyday, then go directly to this continuously updated (but not edited) news list generated by computer at:
http://longevity-science.org/Aging-News.php

Alternatively bookmark and check this Longevity Science Blog periodically for new edited releases of "Aging & Longevity Research News" at:
http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/

Please feel free to post your comments below, so that we could improve further issues of the "Aging & Longevity Research News" newsletter!

Thank you!
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Aging & Longevity Research News

• No Proof That Growth Hormone Therapy Makes You Live Longer, Study Finds
Purveyors of anti-aging elixirs tout human growth hormone as a remedy for all things sagging -- from skin to libidos -- and claim it can even prevent or reverse aging. But researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine say there's no evidence to suggest that this purported fountain of youth has any more effect than a trickle of tap water when it comes to fending off Father Time.


• Does It Make SENS?
Read a new scientific discussion regarding SENS: the"Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" scientific initiative, and see the most recent comments made by:
(1). Professor Stephen R. Spindler at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California, Riverside, USA, and
(2). Professor Ruth Itzhaki, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.


• Older Moms, Healthy Families
At Any Age, Moms Still Have Much to Offer Their Kids.


• Want to Live to be 100? First-born Have Better Chance
Firstborn children are 1.7 times as likely as their siblings to live to be 100. An even stronger predictor of longevity is how young their mother was when they were born. Those whose mothers were younger than 25 were twice as likely to survive beyond a century.

• World's Oldest Mom Lied To Get Treatment
A 67-year-old woman who is believed to be the world's oldest new mother told a British newspaper she lied to a U.S. fertility clinic " saying she was 55 " to get treatment. The woman was 66 when she gave birth to twin boys in December.

• Vital Signs: Hazards: Antidepressant Linked to Fractures in Older People
Daily use of a common class of antidepressant may double the risk of fracture in people older than 50, a study reports.

• Large families linked to reduced parents' lifespan
Parents of large families face a modest increase in the risk of death compared to those with only a few children, a study of couples married in the 1800s suggests.

• Mammograms Drop In Women 40 And Older
The Centers for Disease Control reports a drop in the percentage of U.S. women 40 and older getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer every one or two years.

• Parkinson's, MS more common than thought
Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and other neurological diseases may be far more common than most people had believed, according to the latest estimates.

• Why some women can't control their bladders
A range of health and lifestyle factors can predispose middle-aged women to bladder-control problems, though the causes tend to shift with age, according to a new study.

• Link Found Between Muscle Damage During Childbirth, Condition Causing Fallen Bladder, Uterus
New research from the University of Michigan Health System establishes one of the strongest connections yet discovered between muscle damage that can occur during vaginal deliveries and pelvic organ prolapse, a condition that causes the uterus, bladder or bowel to fall down later in a woman's life

• Exercise Has No Effect On Risk Of Knee Osteoarthritis, Study Finds
A new study examined the effects of physical activity over a long period in older adults, many of whom were overweight, and found that exercise neither protects against nor increases the risk of knee OA.

• Molecular Motors And Brakes Work Together In Cells
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that microtubules -- components responsible for shape, movement, and replication within cells -- use proteins that act as molecular motors and brakes to organize into their correct structure. If microtubules are not formed properly such basic functions as cell division and transport can go wrong, which may have implications in such disease processes as cancer and dementia.

• Could Some Sun Be Good for Your Skin?
Early research conducted at Stanford University suggests that sunlight in small doses may protect skin from damage. It triggers the synthesis of vitamin D, which may help protect against cancer and other disorders.


New Books:

• Biological Aging:
Methods And Protocols
(Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton, N.J.), V. 371.)
by Trygve O. Tollefsbol (Editor)


• Aging Nation:
The Economics and Politics of Growing Older in America
by James H. Schulz, Robert H. Binstock


• New Dynamics in Old Age:
Individual, Environmental And Societal Perspectives
(Society and Aging Series)
by Hans-Werner, Ph.D. Wahl (Editor), Clemens Tesch-roemer (Editor), Andreas Hoff (Editor)



• The Evolution of Death:
Why We Are Living Longer
(Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology)
by Stanley Shostak



• Biology, Sociology, Geology by Computational Physicists,
Volume 1 (Monograph Series on Nonlinear Science and Complexity)
by Dietrich Stauffer et al.

This book includes discussion of biological aging, human mortality and longevity.


• What Books People Read?
Somewhat disturbing list of best-selling books on aging and longevity.


• Wish to Announce Your New Book or Book Chapter?
Continuously updated list of new interesting books on aging and longevity. You can announce there your new book or book chapter (it's free!).


Future Scientific Meetings:

• Workshop on Human Longevity
Ongoing Plans for a Scientific Workshop on Human Longevity in Malasiya, November, 2007


Questions? Comments?
Post them below!

BBC Interview on Human Longevity

BBC interview on human longevity with Dr. Leonid Gavrilov aired live on Monday, January 29, 2007

Greetings,

Yesterday I have got a surprising telephone call from the BBC asking for live interview on longevity topic. Peter Karlsen of the BBC Radio Five Live has provided me with five questions as talking points just a couple of hours before the interview took place. Here are these questions and my brief responses (given the lack of time provided to me to prepare):

Q 1: What is the secret to longevity and old age?

1. To have particularly long-lived parents, as it was first found by American scientist Raymond Pearl in 1930s, and confirmed many times by other researches since then.

2. Being a male hurts, but you can do little about this . Most centenarians are women.

3. We recently found that it helps a lot to be born to a particularly young mother (before age 25 years). This new scientific finding has been just published this month in a peer-reviewed professional journal:

Gavrilova N.S., Gavrilov L.A. Search for Predictors of Exceptional Human Longevity: Using Computerized Genealogies and Internet Resources for Human Longevity Studies. North American Actuarial Journal, 2007, 11(1): 49-67.
Stories about this new scientific finding has appeared recently in New Scientist, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, The Sun, Forbes, and Daily Mail

Q 2: Why does certain people live so much longer than others?

This is the same first question put in different words, is not it? What is interesting that even genetically identical laboratory animals living in the same strictly controlled laboratory conditions, still have very different lifespans. This says us that chance events are extremely important.

Q 3: What are your tips for living longer?

Take care of yourself, avoid really bad habits (smoking, heavy drinking, violent conflicts, stresses, etc.). Exercise when you have time, have enough sleep, eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, vitamins would not harm too.Try to find out your risk factors (blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol etc.), and modify your life accordingly to prevent diseases to the extent possible.Do understand that reserve capacity is greatly diminishes with age, so do not make heroic adventures, as if you are 20 year-old.

Q 4: What does science tell us as to who will live longer, is it about genes?

Yes, because longevity runs in families, there are reasons to look for human longevity genes. But they are not found yet in humans, and it is likely that instead of small number of major longevity genes, there may be numerous genes with small longevity effects.

What does science tells us is that early-life childhood conditions do matter for survival 80 years later. It helps a lot to be born in rural rather than urban area, presumably because the load of child infections was much higher in large cities in the past. Surprisingly even the month of birth matters, presumably because of profound seasonal variation in childhood diseases and vitamin deficiency in the past:

Gavrilov L.A., Gavrilova N.S. Childhood Conditions and Exceptional Longevity. Full paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, CA, April 1, 2006, 35 pages. Published online at: http://paa2006.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=61675

Q 5: How important is diet and happiness?

Diet seems to be very important. Trivial things like overeating and obesity can kill you.

As for happiness, not sure. It certainly helps to avoid depression.
But not sure that extreme idiotic happiness would really help to live longer.

The interview was "provoked" by news about the death of the oldest person in the world:

"Mrs Tillman, the daughter of former slaves, died "peacefully" on Sunday night, said an official at a nursing home in Hartford, Connecticut. Mrs Tillman had lived independently until she was 110 and had never smoked or drank, her family and friends said. She only became the world's oldest person last week, after the death of a 115-year-old man in Puerto Rico, the Guinness Book of World Records said. "She was a wonderful woman," said Karen Chadderton, administrator of Riverside health and Rehabilitation Center in Hartford. Mrs Tillman had been very religious and had always attributed her longevity to God's will, according to her family and friends. She was born on 22 November 1892 on a plantation near Gibsonville in North Carolina. In an interview with a local historical society in 1994, Mrs Tillman said her parents had been slaves."

Do you have better answers to these questions?
If so, post them here!

SENS

SENS stands for
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence
scientific initiative

See also:
What is Aging? Anti-Aging Is Immortality Possible?

To Read comments on this topic and post your own thoughts, click here


Greetings,

Recently Steve Connor, the science editor of 'The Independent' has published an interesting review of a new popular book "How to Live Forever or Die Trying", by Bryan Appleyard.

The review is critical, which is understandable for evaluations of a popular book, but I am struck by the following comment about the life-extension researcher, Dr. Aubrey de Grey:

"... de Grey's belief in immortality - or "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" - are something of a laughing-stock among mainstream gerontologists"

Well, all you need to do is just to take a look at this scientific book below, which contains research publications by over a hundred of mainstream gerontologists, with Dr. Aubrey de Grey being a Scientific Editor (!):

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence:
Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable
(Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)



Obviously, the "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) are not a laughing-stock any longer among mainstream gerontologists, and many of them do participate in this scientific initiative.

Also read the relevant consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" signed by seven experts and published in Science, which acknowledges the legitimacy of anti-aging studies and cites the list of these anti-aging scientific publications. Please note that the first author of this published consensus letter is Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
This Science letter was later cited in a prestigious 2003 Macmillan Encyclopedia of Population, USA with a comment: "...the possibility should not be excluded that current intensive biomedical anti-aging studies may help to extend the healthy and productive period of human life in the future (de Grey et al., 2002)."

My personal attitude to the SENS scientific initiative could be best characterized with a quote by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950):

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;

the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

"Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

See also: New Books Discussing SENS

Disclaimer for a potential conflict of interest

We have published three articles in this SENS book, so we do know what we are talking about:

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Early-Life Programming of Aging and Longevity: The Idea of High Initial Damage Load (the HIDL Hypothesis). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 496-501.

Gavrilova NS, Gavrilov LA, Semyonova VG, Evdokushkina GN. Does Exceptional Human Longevity Come With High Cost of Infertility? Testing the Evolutionary Theories of Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 513-517.

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. The Reliability-Engineering Approach to the Problem of Biological Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004,
1019: 509-512.

Also I have to admit that I am one of seven coauthors of the above mentioned consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" published in Science.

See also:
What is Aging? Theories of Aging Anti-Aging Population Aging

Read further comments, and post your own thoughts here

Books

Our 10 scientific books published in co-authorship with other researchers

See also:
What is Aging? Theories of Aging Anti-Aging Population Aging


Greetings,

I thought perhaps you may be interested to see these 10 scientific books on aging and longevity collected together into one list:


Biology of Life Span:
A Quantitative Approach


Gavrilov L.A., Gavrilova N.S. The Biology of Life Span: A Quantitative Approach, NY: Harwood Academic Publisher, 1991, 385p.

This book is selected and cited by Encyclopedia Britannica as recommended reference.
The book was also reviewed by Nature (1991, 352: 767), British Medical Journal (1992, 305: 431), Population and Development Review (1992, 18: 555 and 1998, 24: 381), Population Studies (1992, 46: 366), Am. J. Epidemiology (1994, 139: 231), Experimental Gerontology (1992, 27: 251), Gerontologist (1991, 31: 707), Human Biology (1992, 64: 630), J. Epidemiology & Community Health (1992, 46: 630), J. Institute of Actuaries (1992, 119: 379), BioEssays (1993, 15: 359), Quarterly Review of Biology (1993, 68: 92), Age and Ageing (1992, 21: 386), Ageing and Society (1991, 11: 509), Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics (1992, 15: 192), Educational Gerontology (1993, 19: 92), Free Radical Biology & Medicine (1992, 12: 331).

Handbook of the Biology of Aging,
Sixth Edition


Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Reliability Theory of Aging and Longevity. In: Masoro E.J. & Austad S.N.. (eds.): Handbook of the Biology of Aging, Sixth Edition. Academic Press. San Diego, CA, USA, 2006, 3-42.

Curtsinger JW, Gavrilova NS, Gavrilov LA. Biodemography of Aging and Age-Specific Mortality in Drosophila melanogaster. In: Masoro E.J. & Austad S.N.. (eds.): Handbook of the Biology of Aging, Sixth Edition. Academic Press. San Diego, CA, USA, 2006, 261-288.


Handbook of Models for Human Aging


Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Models of Systems Failure in Aging. In: P Michael Conn (Editor): Handbook of Models for Human Aging, Burlington, MA : Elsevier Academic Press, 2006. 45-68. ISBN 0123693918.


Grandmotherhood:
The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life


Gavrilova, N.S., Gavrilov, L.A. Human longevity and reproduction: An evolutionary perspective. In: Voland, E., Chasiotis, A. & Schiefenhoevel, W. (eds.): Grandmotherhood - The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life. Rutgers University Press. New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 2005, 59-80.


Ruling Russia:
Law, Crime, and Justice in a Changing Society


Gavrilova, N.S., Gavrilov, L.A., Semyonova, V.G., Evdokushkina, G.N., Ivanova, A.E. 2005. Patterns of violent crime in Russia. In: Pridemore, W.A. (ed.). Ruling Russia: Law, Crime, and Justice in a Changing Society. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publ., Inc, 117-145.


Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence:
Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable
(Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)


Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Early-Life Programming of Aging and Longevity: The Idea of High Initial Damage Load (the HIDL Hypothesis). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 496-501.

Gavrilova NS, Gavrilov LA, Semyonova VG, Evdokushkina GN. Does Exceptional Human Longevity Come With High Cost of Infertility? Testing the Evolutionary Theories of Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 513-517.

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. The Reliability-Engineering Approach to the Problem of Biological Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 509-512.


Modulating Aging and Longevity
(Biology of Aging and its Modulation)

Gavrilov, L.A., Gavrilova, N.S. Early-life factors modulating lifespan. In: Rattan, S.I.S. (Ed.). Modulating Aging and Longevity. 2003. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2003, 27-50.


Encyclopedia of Population

Gavrilov L.A., Heuveline P. Aging of Population. In: Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (Eds.) The Encyclopedia of Population. New York, Macmillan Reference USA, 2003, vol.1, 32-37.


Encyclopedia of Aging
(4 Volume Set)

Gavrilova, N.S., Gavrilov, L.A. Evolution of Aging. In: David J. Ekerdt (ed.)Encyclopedia of Aging, New York, Macmillan Reference USA, 2002, vol.2, 458-467.

Gavrilov, L.A., Gavrilova, N.S. Genetics. In: David J. Ekerdt (ed.) Encyclopedia of Aging, New York, Macmillan Reference USA, 2002, vol.2, 536-538.

Gavrilova, N.S., Gavrilov, L.A. Genetics: Ethnicity. In: David J. Ekerdt (ed.)Encyclopedia of Aging, New York, Macmillan Reference USA, 2002, vol.2, 538-539.


Sex and Longevity:
Sexuality, Gender, Reproduction, Parenthood (Research and Perspectives in Longevity)

Gavrilov, L.A., Gavrilova, N.S. Human longevity and parental age at conception. In: J.-M.Robine, T.B.L. Kirkwood, M. Allard (eds.) Sex and Longevity: Sexuality, Gender, Reproduction, Parenthood, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2000, 7-31.

Read further comments, and post your own thoughts here