Wednesday, September 23, 2015

New Longevity Study

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to alert you about our new centenarian study of longevity predictors, just published by professional peer-reviewed journal:

Predictors of Exceptional Longevity:
Effects of Early-Life and Midlife Conditions,
and Familial Longevity
Leonid A. Gavrilov & Natalia S. Gavrilova
North American Actuarial Journal, 19(3), 174–186, 2015
DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2015.1018390

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10920277.2015.1018390
 Feel free to ask us for a complimentary copy of this new article, if you have any problems downloading it from provided link.
Comments and suggestions are most welcome!

Kind regards,
-- Leonid and Natalia

-------------------------------------------------
-- Leonid Gavrilov, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
-- Natalia Gavrilova, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
Center on Aging, NORC at the University of Chicago
Website: http://longevity-science.org/

Friday, September 18, 2015

GSA Interest Group meeting, November 21

Greetings,

We are pleased to alert you about upcoming meeting of the GSA Interest Group "Societal Implications of Delaying Aging"  at the 2015 Annual conference of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday, November 21, meeting room "Asia 1" at  7:00 PM:
https://www.geron.org/meetings-events/gsa-annual-scientific-meeting/meeting-program/interest-group-meetings

One confirmed  speaker for this event is  Dr. Randall Kuhn, Director of Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver, who recently published a new peer-reviewed study on related topic:

"Opportunities and challenges of a world with negligible senescence"  
Technological Forecasting and Social Change,  Volume 99, October 2015, Pages 77–91,  doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2015.06.031
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162515001985

Please advise who could be a good discussant for this presentation, and what other additional speakers could be invited to this event.

Thank you, and looking forward to hear from you.

Hope to see you there!

Kind regards,

-- Leonid  and  Natalia 


Conveners and Organizers for GSA Interest Group meeting "Societal Implications of Delaying Aging"

-------------------------------------------------------------
-- Leonid Gavrilov, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
-- Natalia Gavrilova, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
Center on Aging, NORC at the University of Chicago
Website: http://longevity-science.org/


Thursday, September 17, 2015

Vandalism at Wikipedia: Please Help!


Greetings,

Recently an entry about our aging theory has been vandalized at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and_longevity

The original, non-vandalized saved text is attached below for your information.

Please contact  the Wikipedia editors, you may know, to restore the original text, if you care.

Thank you!

Cordially,

-- Leonid  and  Natalia

-------------------------------------------------------------
-- Leonid Gavrilov, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
-- Natalia Gavrilova, Ph.D., GSA Fellow
Center on Aging, NORC at the University of Chicago
Website: http://longevity-science.org/

===================

Reliability theory of aging and longevity is a scientific approach aimed to gain theoretical insights into mechanisms of biological aging and species survival patterns by applying a general theory of systems failure, known as reliability theory.

Contents

Overview

Reliability theory allows researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components. Applications of reliability-theory approach to the problem of biological aging and species longevity lead to the following conclusions:
  1. Redundancy is a key for understanding aging and the systemic nature of aging in particular. Systems, which are redundant in numbers of irreplaceable elements, do deteriorate (that is, age) over time, even if they are built of non-aging elements.
  2. Paradoxically, the apparent aging rate or expression of aging (measured as relative differences in failure rates between compared age groups) is higher for systems with higher redundancy levels.
  3. Redundancy exhaustion over the life course explains the observed 'compensation law of mortality' (mortality convergence at later life, when death rates are becoming relatively similar at advanced ages for different populations of the same biological species), as well as the observed late-life mortality deceleration, leveling-off, and mortality plateaus.
  4. Living organisms seem to be formed with a high initial load of damage (HIDL hypothesis), and therefore their lifespan and aging patterns may be sensitive to early-life conditions that determine this initial damage load during early development. The idea of early-life programming of aging and longevity may have important practical implications for developing early-life interventions promoting health and longevity.
  5. Reliability theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems. It also explains why organisms "prefer" to die according to the Gompertz law, while technical devices usually fail according to the Weibull (power) law. Theoretical conditions are specified when organisms die according to the Weibull law: organisms should be relatively free of initial flaws and defects. The theory makes it possible to find a general failure law applicable to all adult and extreme old ages, where the Gompertz and the Weibull laws are just special cases of this more general failure law.
  6. Reliability theory helps evolutionary theories to explain how the age of onset of deleterious mutations could be postponed during evolution, which could be easily achieved by a simple increase in initial redundancy levels. From the reliability perspective, the increase in initial redundancy levels is the simplest way to improve survival at particularly early reproductive ages (with gains fading at older ages). This matches exactly with the higher fitness priority of early reproductive ages emphasized by evolutionary theories. Evolutionary and reliability ideas also help in understanding why organisms seem to "choose" a simple but short-term solution of the survival problem through enhancing the systems' redundancy, instead of a more permanent but complicated solution based on rigorous repair (with the potential of achieving negligible senescence). Thus there are promising opportunities for merging the reliability and evolutionary theories of aging.
Overall, the reliability theory provides a parsimonious explanation for many important aging-related phenomena and suggests a number of interesting testable predictions. Therefore, reliability theory seems to be a promising approach for developing a comprehensive theory of aging and longevity integrating mathematical methods with specific biological knowledge and evolutionary ideas.
Reliability theory of aging provides an optimistic perspective on the opportunities for healthy life-extension. According to reliability theory, human lifespan is not fixed, and it could be further increased through better body maintenance, repair, and replacement of the failed body parts in the future.

See also

References

External links

Media coverage

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