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Category: life extension – Page 647

Why live longer when the future looks so grim?

Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn’t want to live longer? Hardly!

#aging

The future looks grim? That’s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there’s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can’t promise the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how ‘sure’ pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I’m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won’t be worth living and there’s thus no point in extending it anyway.

First, we need to take into account that the quality of human life has been improving, not worsening, throughout history. Granted, there still are things that are not optimal, but there used to be many more. Sure, it sucks that your pet-peeve politician has been appointed president of your country (any reference to recent historical events is entirely coincidental), and it sucks that poverty and famine haven’t yet been entirely eradicated, but none of these implies that things will get worse. There’s a limit to how long a president can be such, and poverty and famine are disappearing all over the world. It takes time for changes to take place, and the fact the world isn’t perfect yet doesn’t mean it will never be. Especially people who are still chronologically young should appreciate the fact that by the time they’re 80 or 90, a long time will have passed, and the world will certainly have changed in the meanwhile.

Who’ll Live Longer: Meat Eaters or Vegetarians?

Increasingly the vegetarian diet seems promising in terms of longevity strategy. Here is a short article exploring this idea.

Our ability to live a long life is influenced by a combination of our genes and our environment. In studies that involve identical twins, scientists have estimated that no more than 30 percent of this influence comes from our genes, meaning that the largest group of factors that control how long a person lives is their environment.

Of the many possible environmental factors, few have been as thoroughly studied or debated as our diet. Calorie restriction, for example, is one area that is being investigated.

So far, studies seem to show that restricting calories can increase lifespan, at least in small creatures. But what works for mice doesn’t necessarily work for humans.

Regenerative Medicine: Scientists Have Successfully Engineered Functioning Human Nerves

In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have grown intestinal tissues with functional nerves in a laboratory setup using human pluripotent stem cells. The synthesized tissue was used to study Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital condition where nerve cells are missing from the colon, causing complications in passing stool. The research is detailed in Nature Medicine.

A pluripotent stem cell is a precursor cell to all the other types of cells in the body. In a petri dish, the stem cells were treated in a biochemical bath that triggered the formation into intestinal tissue. The novel part of the study was the construction of a nervous system on the intestinal organoid. The researchers manipulated neural crest cells to grow a system of nerves. By putting together the neural crest cells and the intestinal tissue at the exact time, they successfully grew together into a complex functional system.

The tissues were transplanted into mice. They worked successfully and showed a structure “remarkably similar” to that of a natural human intestine.

CellAge Campaign Q&A: Are Senescent Macrophages The Problem Or Other Cell Types?

Some research suggests macrophages might be the best target for senescent cell therapies. Here is Mantas from cell age answering a reader question “Are senescent macrophages the problem of other cell types?”

Mantas from CellAge answers a question from one of our readers who asked if senescent macrophages (the cleaner cells of the body) should be the focus of senescent cell removal. Some research this year by Gudkov et al. suggests that macrophages become tainted by senescent cell signals and become dysfunctional and that removing them could be beneficial as they could be replaced with macrophages that do work properly.

Check out the campaign at Lifespan.io and donate to a better healthier future:

https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescen…c-biology/

CellAge Campaign Q&A: Is It Safe To Remove Senescent Cells? | Lifespan.io

Is it safe to remove senescent cells? This is a common question we hear when talking about senolytic therapies designed to remove these problem cells that accumulate with age and play havoc with the body and its ability to repair.

Mantas from CellAge answers a question from one of our readers about senescent cell removal therapy. The removal of senescent cells has become a very hot topic this year with numerous experiments showing positive results for health and disease mitigation.

Check out the campaign at Lifespan.io and donate to a better healthier future:

https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescen…c-biology/

A history of global living conditions in 5 charts

To understand if the world is getting worse you have to look at the past data to see. So many people suggest we are heading for dystopia especially when talking about increased lifespans through technology but this doesnt really measure up against the facts. Life has never been so good and worth fighting for!

A common objection to increased lifespans is that the world is either already a horrible place or heading into some kind of sci-fiction dystopia not worth living. There are problems in the world but this article shows just how much science and technology has improved lives for decades.

The truth is there are problems in the world but nothing that we cannot overcome if we try. The world is a wonderful place, there is every reason to want to be alive and experience it and technology could let us live longer to enjoy it even more.

“Freedom is impossible without faith in free people. And if we are not aware of our history and falsely believe the opposite of what is true we risk losing faith in each other.”

Modular Brain Network Organization Predicts Response to Cognitive Training in Older Adults

Cognitive training interventions are a promising approach to mitigate cognitive deficits common in aging and, ultimately, to improve functioning in older adults. Baseline neural factors, such as properties of brain networks, may predict training outcomes and can be used to improve the effectiveness of interventions. Here, we investigated the relationship between baseline brain network modularity, a measure of the segregation of brain sub-networks, and training-related gains in cognition in older adults. We found that older adults with more segregated brain sub-networks (i.e., more modular networks) at baseline exhibited greater training improvements in the ability to synthesize complex information. Further, the relationship between modularity and training-related gains was more pronounced in sub-networks mediating “associative” functions compared with those involved in sensory-motor processing. These results suggest that assessments of brain networks can be used as a biomarker to guide the implementation of cognitive interventions and improve outcomes across individuals. More broadly, these findings also suggest that properties of brain networks may capture individual differences in learning and neuroplasticity.

Trail Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT#00977418

Citation: Gallen CL, Baniqued PL, Chapman SB, Aslan S, Keebler M, Didehbani N, et al. (2016) Modular Brain Network Organization Predicts Response to Cognitive Training in Older Adults. PLoS ONE 11(12): e0169015. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169015

CellAge Campaign Q&A: Are You a For-Profit Company? | Lifespan.io

Non-profit research ultimately benefits for-profit companies and is an essential part of the development chain of any therapy.

Companies like Unity Biotech have taken non-profit research and are developing it for-profit, this is the only way that therapies will make it to market and pay for the huge costs involved in development. You may have concerns that our current crowdfunding project is with a for-profit company so here is CellAge to answer this question.

Their campaign can be found at Lifespan.io here:
https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescen…ic-biology

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