Lifeboat Foundation

Our immune system’s capacity to mount a well-regulated defense against foreign substances, including toxins, weakens with age and makes vaccines less effective in people over age 65. At the same time, research has shown that immunotherapy targeting neurotoxic forms of the peptide amyloid beta (oligomeric Aβ) may halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common age-related neurodegenerative disease.

A team led by Chuanhai Cao, Ph.D., of the University of South Florida Health (USF Health), has focused on overcoming, in those with impaired immunity, excess inflammation and other complications that interfere with development of a therapeutic Alzheimer’s vaccine.

Now, a preclinical study by Dr. Cao and colleagues indicates that an antigen-presenting dendritic vaccine with a specific antibody response to oligomeric Aβ may be safer and offer clinical benefit in treating Alzheimer’s disease. The vaccine, called E22W42 DC, uses immune cells known as dendritic cells (DC) loaded with a modified Aβ peptide as the antigen.

“Who are we? What are we composed of? What is matter? What does matter? Is the body just a vessel with an expiration date?” asks American rapper GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, in Liquid Science, the show about science and imagination he hosts on Red Bull TV. In this episode, GZA is on a “quest to understand the human desire to live forever”.

Trying to find answers to such questions is nothing new. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled ‘‘Transhumanist’ eternal life? No thanks, I’d rather learn not to fear death’, Arthur C Brooks explains that, back in the fifth century before Christ, Greek historian Herodotus wrote about “a race of people in northern Africa who, according to local lore, never seemed to age”.

Eternal youth and immortality have always fascinated humanity, but we’ve not had much success finding them. Until now.

First in a series of Longevity Dialogues. Suggestions for future focus encouraged.

Host Mark Sackler conducts a lively discussion on issues involved with the anticipated implementation and implications of radical life extension. With XPrize innovation board member Sergey Young, and futurist authors David Wood and Jose Cordeiro.

Here’s my latest post!

Sleep changes during aging may impact Alzheimer’s disease risk, and with the goal of minimizing that risk, can sleep, in particular, levels of deep sleep, be optimized?

However, it was unclear how TERRA got to the tip of chromosomes and remained there. “The telomere makes up only a tiny bit of the total chromosomal DNA, so the question is ‘how does this RNA find its home?’” Lingner says. To address this question, postdoc Marianna Feretzaki and others in the teams of Joachim Lingner at EPFL and Lumir Krejci at Masaryk University set out to analyze the mechanism through which TERRA accumulates at telomeres, as well as the proteins involved in this process. The findings are published in * Nature*.

**Finding home**

By visualizing TERRA molecules under a microscope, the researchers found that a short stretch of the RNA is crucial to bring it to telomeres. Further experiments showed that once TERRA reaches the tip of chromosomes, several proteins regulate its association with telomeres. Among these proteins, one called RAD51 plays a particularly important role, Lingner says.

Continue reading “Scientists home in on the mechanism that protects cells from premature aging” »

If Dr. Ken Berry actually meant to say that you need to eat saturated fat for your nerves and brain, he flunks Biochem 101. First of all, your body can make all the saturated fat you need out of carbs and proteins. You don’t need to eat ANY saturated fat. Second, the most common fatty acid in your brain is the polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) called DHA, which you DO need to eat, because you can’t make it from non-fats (you need to eat it or EPA in things like seafood, or at least the precursor omega-3 PUFA called ALA in cold-climate plants.) Ironically enough, ALA is common in Canola oil, which Dr. Berry deprecates, but not in the tropical plant oils that he likes. More on that later.

A diet with a lot of saturated fat is NOT the best for the heart. The American Heart Association continues to recommend low saturated fat diets (with the missing sat-fat replaced by mono and polyunsaturated fat, not by carbohydrates) because the evidence from animal and human trials and even properly controlled epidemiology, shows these the best diets (see reference below—an extensive review of meta analyses [1]). Examples are the DASH hypertension diet and the closely-related Mediterranean diet (which has lots of olive oil for monounsaturated fatty acid, and seafood for DHA). If Dr. Berry thinks he has something better than the Mediterranean diet for longevity, what is his direct evidence?

Saturated fat, of course, is used by the body to make cholesterol (you don’t need to eat any cholesterol for this reason), and it does raise cholesterol levels and it does increase atherosclerosis in nearly every controlled prospective experimental model in animals and humans. This is the gold standard of evidence in medicine.

Continue reading “Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association” »

If Dr. Ken Berry actually meant to say that you need to eat saturated fat for your nerves and brain, he flunks Biochem 101. First of all, your body can make all the saturated fat you need out of carbs and proteins. You don’t need to eat ANY saturated fat. Second, the most common fatty acid in your brain is the polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) called DHA, which you DO need to eat, because you can’t make it from non-fats (you need to eat it in things like seafood, or at least the precursor omega-3 PUFA called ALA in cold-climate plants.) Ironically enough ALAis common in Canola oil, which Dr. Berry deprecates, but not in the tropical plant oils he likes. More on that later. A diet with a lot of saturated fat is NOT the best for the heart. The American Heart Association continues to recommend low saturated fat diets (with the missing sat-fat replaced by mono and polyunsaturated fat, not by carbohydrates) because the evidence from animal and human trials and even properly controlled epidemiology, shows these the best diets (see reference below–an extensive review of meta analyses [1]). Examples are the DASH hypertension diet and the closely-related Mediterranean diet (which has lots of olive oil for monounsaturated fatty acid, and seafood for DHA). If Dr. Berrythinks he has something better than the Mediterranean diet for longevity, what is his direct evidence? Saturated fat, of course, is used by the body to make cholesterol (you don’t need to eat any cholesterol for this reason), and it does raise cholesterol levels and it does increase atherosclerosis in nearly every controlled prospective experimental model in animals and humans. This is the gold standard of evidence in medicine.

One can go only so far with epidemiology, because occasionally when one bad thing (saturated fat) is heavily replaced for calories by another bad thing (certain carbohydrates) one detects no epidemiologic effect from changing just the first thing.

Continue reading “Which Cooking Oils are Safe? (Which to AVOID)” »

When it comes to vitamin D, most adults exhibit either frank deficiency, which results in clear clinical symptoms, or insufficiency, which often goes undetected. But how that insufficiency impacts physical health and the vulnerability of older adults to frailty as they age has been difficult to determine.

Now a University at Buffalo study of 24–28–month-old mice, the equivalent of 65-to-80-year-old adults, has found that frailty can be slowed with what might be considered “over” supplementation with vitamin D, referred to as “hypersufficiency.”

Published Sept. 30 in Nutrients, the research builds on previous work that Kenneth L. Seldeen, Ph.D., first author and research assistant professor in the Department of Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, has been conducting for more than a decade with colleague Bruce R. Troen, MD, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and director of the Center for Successful Aging, both in the Jacobs School.