All aging stories

Research links panic and heart attack in older women

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:46:39 -0400

New research has linked panic attacks in older women with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from all causes, adding panic attacks to the growing list of mental and emotional conditions with potentially deadly physical effects.

A study of more than 3,300 women ages 51 to 83 indicated that panic attacks were relatively common, suffered by about 10 percent of those in the study. While heart attacks and strokes were relatively rare, those suffering panic attacks had four times the risk of heart attack, three times the risk of heart attack or stroke, and twice the risk of dying from any cause as those who didn’t.

Largest twin study of age-related macular degeneration finds genetics and environment play large role in disease

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:33:31 -0400

Researchers led by Johanna M. Seddon, M.D., at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health conducted the largest study of twins of its kind. Analyses of twins showed that genetic factors play a substantial role in the etiology of AMD and associated macular characteristics, explaining 46 percent to 71 percent of the variation in the overall severity of the disease. They found that environmental factors unique to each twin also contribute to the occurrence of this disease.

Adding years to your life

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:30:36 -0400

A research team did the first global study of the potential increase in life expectancy if 20 well-known risk factors could be eliminated or reduced to safer levels. These factors include overnourishment and undernourishment, unsafe sex, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, polluted water, poor sanitation, and certain on-the-job risks. "We wanted to give a picture of what the whole world would look like without these major causes of death and disease," notes Majid Ezzati, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Approximately half of deaths and 40 percent of the total health loss worldwide resulted from the joint effects of these risk factors in the year 2000. It was surprising to find out how large the effects of eliminating them were. The increase in healthy life expectancy ranges from 4.4 years in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand to more than 16 years in Botswana, Congo, Kenya, and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Think of it, excluding these factors could result in an average gain of more than nine years of perfect health for every person in the world."

Eating less and living longer

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:29:01 -0400

Tantalizing evidence exists that cutting calories by 20 percent helps monkeys, who are close relatives, to live longer, healthier lives. And, in one nonscientific program, adults are reducing their caloric intake by as much as 30 percent in the hope of living healthfully (if not too happily) for 100 years or more. What if scientists can figure out just what combination of genes and proteins extends the lives of so many other living things that don't fully give in to their hunger? In that case, it might be possible to come up with drugs that would let us have our cake and eat it, too. David Sinclair and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have cooked up some delicious clues to how this might happen. They found an enzyme that makes yeast cells live longer simply because they think they are starving. The enzyme catalyzes a marked increase in the activity of a protein known as Sir2, which in turn promotes yeast survival by reducing events associated with cell death. With the help of the enzyme, called Pnc1, yeast cells live 70 percent longer. If humans lived that much longer, their average life span would increase from 80 to 136 years. Humans aren't yeast, or worms, flies, or rats, but they do have a version of Sir2 called SIRT1.

Incidence of hip fractures reduced by walking

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:25:58 -0400

In the United States, one in every three adults 65 years old or older falls each year, with hip fractures resulting in the greatest number of deaths and most serious health problems. Women account for 80 percent of the 300,000 hip fractures that occur annually. A study, which included investigators from the Harvard School of Public Health, showed that women who walked at least four hours per week had approximately a 40 percent reduction in the risk of hip fracture, compared with women who were mostly sedentary. Higher-impact exercise provided greater protection. Exercise equivalent to about three hours of jogging per week reduced risk of hip fracture by approximately 50 percent. These results were based on the analysis of questionnaires beginning in 1986 from more than 61,000 postmenopausal women, ranging in age from 40 to 77 years, participating in the Brigham and Women's Hospital-based Nurses' Health Study.

Researchers eye earliest triggers of age-related macular degeneration

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:18:53 -0400

Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness for Americans over 60 years of age. It affects more than 14 million people. But how it attacks the macula, the center of the retina, is a controversial question. The macula is where the cones -- the color and light sensing cells of the eye -- reside. Macular degeneration involves the decreased functioning of the cones. Some researchers have long thought that the demise of the cones involves the inability of the cones to regenerate a necessary pigment. But a more complicated picture is emerging because of the work of Harvard researchers. Schepens Eye Research Institute's Ann Elsner, Stephen Burns, and John Weiter have been studying people with early stages of disease and found that the cones' ability to collect light is impaired even when their ability to regenerate pigment is about normal. The researchers, whose report appears in the January 2002 Journal of the Optical Society of America, suggest that the initial problem lies not in the cones' ability to recycle their light-processing pigment but in their ability to physically capture light in the first place. The findings could be used to prevent future generations from suffering macular degeneration's damage.

Harvard scientists identify chromosome location of genes associated with long life

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:14:27 -0400

Scientists have long thought of aging as a complex process affected by perhaps a thousand genes. So a recent discovery by Harvard scientists that a gene or genes located on a region of human Chromosome 4 may help people to live to age 100 was something of a surprise. "This is the first study to use humans to try to find genes that play a role in life span," said Assistant Professor of Medicine Thomas Perls, one of the study's co-authors and a geriatrician at Beth Israel Deaconess and director of the New England Centenarian Study. "Many investigators thought longevity was far more complex a trait that wouldn't be influenced by just a few genes." "We have known that only a few genes influence longevity in lower organisms and that now appears to be true in humans," said Louis M.

Growth factor seen to reverse loss of muscle from aging, disease

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:11:54 -0400

Previous work by Nadia Rosenthal of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues showed that injection of a virus directing the expression of a molecule known as insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) into a skeletal muscle resulted in a much larger and stronger muscle. Now research described by Rosenthal and colleagues illustrates that the effect of IGF-I that they had previously seen "holds up in context of the whole body," Rosenthal says. Rosenthal and her collaborator, Antonio Musaro at the University of Rome, are currently interested in understanding the signal transduction pathways that allow IGF-I to trigger such dramatic changes in muscle and the effects of IGF-I in animal models of muscular dystrophy.

First indications that aging may be regulated by brain

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:04:15 -0400

A little worm called Caenorhabditis elegans was the first creature to have all its genes sequenced, more than 19,000 of them. When the human genome was sequenced, researchers found that C. elegans shares about 40 percent of its genes with human beings. Two such genes — with potentially important consequences for humans — were recently discovered in the laboratory of Gary Ruvkun. One of the genes regulates the development from an egg to an adult in a whole Noah's ark of animals — jellyfish, fruit flies, zebra fish, mice, and, possibly, humans. The other regulates the life span of many animals.

Cognitive testing of elderly could help detect medical problems

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:06:54 -0400

Shari Bassuk, research fellow in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues have found that even mild impairments in areas such as memory and orientation were strongly predictive of mortality among people under the age of 80 years old. "There are major implications for these findings for people in their 60s and 70s because cognitive change is so predictive of mortality in the short term," said Bassuk. The researchers found that cognitive declines in people between the ages of 65 and 80 have a marked impact on survival. The more rapid the decline, the greater the impact.