Age-related diseases are among the more visible signs of accumulated biological damage that occurs over time - aging is damage. So we should expect to see less of all such conditions in longer lived populations, and here researchers demonstrate that point for osteoarthritis: "Previous studies have reported that centenarians escape the major age-related diseases. No studies on prevalence and severity of osteoarthritis (OA) in longevity population have previously been reported. Because OA is associated with morbidity and mortality, we hypothesized that radiographic hand OA would generally be less prevalent and would develop at a later age in longevity populations vs non-longevity populations. ... Longevity index was calculated as a ratio of the number of individuals aged [greater than] 90 years vs the number of people aged [greater than] 60, expressed per mil. A population with longevity index [greater than] 40 was considered as a longevity population. ... A significant difference in age standardized prevalence of hand OA was found between each pair of studied samples ... We observed that the pattern of radiographic hand OA in longevity populations differs from the pattern in non-longevity populations. On average, first joints with OA appear at an older age, and progression of hand OA [is] slower."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22526078

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Following on from research into the mechanisms of rapamycin released earlier this month, here is more on the way it might generate its benefits to longevity in laboratory mammals: "Balancing quiescence with proliferation is of paramount importance for adult stem cells in order to avoid hyperproliferation and cell depletion. In some models, stem cell exhaustion may be reversed with the drug rapamycin, which was shown can suppress cellular senescence in vitro and extend lifespan in animals. We hypothesized that rapamycin increases the expression of oxidative stress response genes in adult stem cells, and that these gene activities diminish with age. To test our hypothesis, we exposed mice to rapamycin and then examined the transcriptome of their spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs). Gene expression microarray analysis revealed that numerous oxidative stress response genes were upregulated upon rapamycin treatment ... When we examined the expression of these genes in 55-week-old wild type SSCs, their levels were significantly reduced compared to 3-week-old SSCs, suggesting that their downregulation is coincident with the aging process in adult stem cells. We conclude that rapamycin-induced stimulation of oxidative stress response genes may promote cellular longevity in SSCs, while a decline in gene expression in aged stem cells could reflect the SSCs' diminished potential to alleviate oxidative stress, a hallmark of aging."

Link: http://impactaging.com/papers/v4/n4/full/100451.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

The employees and appointees of the US Food and Drug Administration have caused an incredible destruction of value and progress over the time that the agency has existed. Their regulatory policies become ever more onerous with each passing year, as unaccountable bureaucrats follow their incentives: nothing good can happen to their careers as a result of approving new technologies, and nothing bad tends to happen to their careers as a result of making it really, really hard to bring new medicine to the clinic. So of course you wind up with an organization whose members collectively pay nothing more than lip service to their declared mission, while working to make sure that medicine stays moribund in a slow-motion stasis. This is most evident in the cancer research community, largely because of its size, but it applies just as evenly across all forms of medicine:

A 2010 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by researchers from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas found that the time from drug discovery to marketing increased from eight years in 1960 to 12 to 15 years in 2010. Five years of this increase results from new regulations boosting the lengths and costs of clinical trials. The regulators aim to prevent cancer patients from dying from toxic new drugs. However, the cancer researchers calculate that the delays caused by requirements for lengthier trials have instead resulted in the loss of 300,000 patient life-years while saving only 16 life-years.

To add to this picture, you must also see incumbent Big Pharma entities and their executives and lobbyists - a deeply enmeshed network of regulatory capture. They are far more willing to use the current system as a weapon to suppress disruptive innovation in their industry than to be a source of innovation themselves. So it goes, just as in any other heavily regulated market. The strategic goals of the major players wind up having very little to do with creating beneficial change, and everything to do with keeping things the same as they are now.

As I've said in the past, it is a waste of energy to fight this. That's a money pit, and resources are better spent on creating actual progress than lining the pockets of politicians, their lackeys, and other corrupt cogs in the system. Work around the roadblock instead: start companies and partner for research development outside the US. Deliver services in Asia and take advantage of cheap flights and the growing medical tourism industry. The only way that the FDA will whither away is to make it entirely irrelevant - and as the bureaucrats keep piling on the costs, erecting an ever higher barrier to actually developing any new medicine in the US, that will become a more popular option. You can be sure that the wealthier and more connected individuals who make regulations and advocate for ever greater powers to accrue to the FDA will be amongst the first flying beyond the US to undergo newer therapies - treatments that they have managed to make illegal or too expensive to exist in their own country.

Some more on this topic:

Though the United States urgently needs new treatments for common illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, the nation's system for drug approval discourages innovation and investment, especially for our most pressing public health challenges. In this paper, we find that the main culprit is the high cost of Phase III clinical trials, which are required for FDA approval of most drugs. We examined drug development in four major public health areas and discovered that for any given drug on the market, typically 90 percent or more of that drug's development costs are incurred in Phase III trials. These costs have skyrocketed in recent years, exacerbating an already serious problem.

The enormous cost and risk of Phase III trials create incentives for researchers and investors to avoid work on medications for the chronic conditions and illnesses that pose the greatest threat to Americans, in terms of health spending and in terms of the number of people affected. This avoidance, in turn, harms overall U.S. health outcomes and drives up the cost of health care.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Researchers continue to investigate the genetics of natural variations in aging, such as those that can be generated through diet (e.g. calorie restriction) in mice: "Dietary interventions are effective ways to extend or shorten lifespan. By examining midlife hepatic gene expressions in mice under different dietary conditions, which resulted in different lifespans and aging-related phenotypes, we were able to identify genes and pathways that modulate the aging process. We found that pathways transcriptionally correlated with diet-modulated lifespan and physiological changes were enriched for lifespan-modifying genes. Intriguingly, mitochondrial gene expression correlated with lifespan and anticorrelated with aging-related pathological changes, whereas peroxisomal gene expression showed an opposite trend. Both organelles produce reactive oxygen species, a proposed causative factor of aging. This finding implicates a contribution of peroxisome to aging. Consistent with this hypothesis, lowering the expression levels of peroxisome proliferation genes decreased the cellular peroxide levels and extended the lifespan of Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans. These findings show that transcriptional changes resulting from dietary interventions can effectively reflect causal factors in aging and identify previously unknown or under-appreciated longevity pathways, such as the peroxisome pathway."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22509016

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Here is a large statistical study that claims a correlation between time spent sitting and mortality rate that exists independently of the well known correlations between level of physical activity and mortality rate. More exercise means a longer life expectancy while more sitting means a lower life expectancy even after considering that those who sit more often are most likely exercising less.

Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in 222,497 Australian Adults:

We linked prospective questionnaire data from 222,497 individuals 45 years or older from the 45 and Up Study to mortality data from the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (Australia) from February 1, 2006, through December 31, 2010. Cox proportional hazards models examined all-cause mortality in relation to sitting time, adjusting for potential confounders that included sex, age, education, urban/rural residence, physical activity, body mass index, smoking status, self-rated health, and disability.

The association between sitting and all-cause mortality appeared consistent across the sexes, age groups, body mass index categories, and physical activity levels and across healthy participants compared with participants with preexisting cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus. ... Prolonged sitting is a risk factor for all-cause mortality, independent of physical activity.

This is not the first study to propose this correlation, of course. There are a range of others from past years. One has to wonder what the mechanism is here, however - my suspicion is that it actually does all come back down to the level of physical activity in the end. In these massive studies the level of exercise and activity is reported by the participants. A person who stands and works is going to be somewhat more active than a person who sits and works, even though that time may not be categorized as physical activity, or reported differently.

Exercise is much like calorie restriction - the effects are so large in comparison to other factors we have easy access to that they are likely to creep into any study.

You might look at a recent study on activity and Alzheimer's disease that was one of the few to use measuring devices rather than reports of activity. One point that emerges is that a fair degree of ongoing low level activity and exercise won't be classified as such by the participants of study without machine measurement. Housework, taking out the trash, the small increase in energy expenditure from standing while waiting versus sitting while waiting, that sort of thing repeated day in and day out. How much you are sitting really does sound a lot like a proxy for how much activity you are undertaking when you are doing things that most people don't really count as activity.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

The 2nd International Conference on the Genetics of Aging and Longevity is presently underway in Moscow, organized by the active Russian arm of the longevity research community - such as the folk behind the Science for Life Extension Foundation - and well-attended by notable life science researchers from around the world. Earlier this month, the Moscow News ran an interview with Michael Batin, one of the organizers. His views are representative of the Russian community, whose members tend to be forthright and direct when it comes to the end goals of longevity science: to defeat aging entirely, banish the suffering it causes, and usher in an era of ageless humans. More power to them - we could do with a lot more of that sort of outspoken advocacy here in the Anglosphere.

The quoted passages below are run through Google's automated translation engine, which unfortunately still butchers Russian:

Q: What is the real goal that we set ourselves right now? Can you say, talk about extending the life of ten years from now?

MB: In ten years? It is not even present, and yesterday. It has long been proven that reducing caloric intake [and even] just a healthy lifestyle [lead to a longer life]. Our goal is different - a victory over an aging, it is by and large the whole purpose of medical science. After all, if you think about all of the doctors [dedicated to the] prolongation of life, the estrangement of death. A person does not want to die right now, well, anti-aging does not differ fundamentally, it is also the struggle with death.

Q: So you're talking about immortality?

MB: Yes. This is the ultimate goal. In the coming ten years, you can raise the life expectancy [to] 150 years, with adequate [resources and large enough research community]. If, for example, to do research megaproject like the American lunar program. And if we know in ten years that will live more than a hundred years, this will give us more time to find a way to further extend [life].

Q: But how? Are there any pills?

MB: If you're talking about a miracle pill, then, of course not. Aging depends on many factors, and is now the main problem is just that we do not know them all. And the proposed mega-project just involves a systematic search for the causes of aging.

...

Q: And it's all in the mega-project? [It's] going to cost [a] quite impossibly high sum.

MB: But now we are spending huge amounts of money on arms - you've seen defense spending in Russia? - And do not invest in [biogerontology], fundamental research on the causes of aging. Even in the U.S., [where] gerontology takes a billion dollars, [that is] their total spending, of that billion is spent on Alzheimer's disease, [on] geriatrics, and [only a small fraction of it on] the fundamental work on finding the root causes of aging.

Research is always the red-haired stepchild of human endeavors, small and neglected behind the bread, circuses, and cathedrals of destruction. But what can one person do about that? Best not to be too weighed down by the essential insanity of the human condition as we have collectively managed to engineer it. It won't actually require more than a few tens of millions of people to decide they want to make a difference and devote some modest effort towards doing something about aging - a community that large, distributed around the world, could assemble the necessary funds and researchers to, for example, complete the SENS project to demonstrate robust rejuvenation in mice. Everyone else can go on building bombs and monuments if they so desire, but the things that matter will still get done, as they have always done, by a motivated tiny minority.

Long after the time in which anyone can easily recall who was US president in 2011, or what party was in power, or which wars of declining empire were fought, and then long after anyone even cares about that ancient history, and later, long after the whole downward slope of the history of the US is but a footnote of interest to scholars of the transition from second to third millennium, and later still, long after anyone can even find out with any great reliability who was US president in 2011 ... long after all these things are forgotten, the first half of the 21st century will still be clearly recalled as the dawn of the era in which aging was conquered.

Progress in science and technology is really the only thing that matters in the long term.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

If you are around 40 years of age and basically average in terms of genes and health, the odds are good that in your first few decades you gained little in the way of longevity advantages over someone 20 years your senior, living in the same location. Medical science is progressing, but the young in wealthier regions of the world don't really use or need all that much medical technology once past the point of vaccinations and the standard - and diminishing - brace of infectious childhood diseases. The point here is that the bulk of any technology-dependent difference in your life span has yet to be engineered: it depends on how well you take care of the health basics from here on out, and far more on how rapidly medical technology progresses towards working rejuvenation biotechnology. If that medical technology isn't researched, isn't developed, isn't made available in a competitive marketplace, then the life trajectory of your parents is not an unreasonable model for your life.

If medical technology stopped moving forward now, then, sad to say, most people would not live a great deal longer than their parents. Gains due to medical technology are all in the future - they can be seen, discussed, and worked on in detail, but they are not here yet. What does that mean? It means that if you are 40, you're half-way done. You have half of the hour-glass left in which to make a difference - to help build the technologies that will smash this limitation of the human condition. Here are some recently released tables of European demographic data to reinforce the point:

In 2009 men in the European Union (EU27) could expect 61.3 Healthy Life Years (HLY), representing almost 80% of their life expectancy (LE) at birth of 76.7 years. Women could expect 62 HLY, 75% of their life expectancy (LE) at birth of 82.6 years in 2009.

Life expectancy at birth is an artificial construct - it is a measure of quality of health and medical technology, useful for comparisons, not a number that corresponds to what will happen to people born now or who are alive now. It reflects the life expectancy of a person born now if every statistical measure of health and mortality derived from the present population remained the same into the future. So in an age of advancing technology you would expect life expectancy figures to be lower than what will turn out to be the average age attained by your peers.

But still, it should be clear that unless progress in extending healthy life becomes more radical and less incremental, there are fair odds of 40-year-old you not living to see 80. This is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is what it is - the only way to make this different is to work to make it different. Support the work of the SENS Foundation, for example, or other causes that are involved in the science of extended human longevity and repair of aging.

One other item to keep in mind is that the cultural and financial institutions - such as Social Security in the US - that are ostensibly there to provide for you in old age some decades from now won't be around to help you. The money you're presently giving to your local government that is supposedly for that purpose? It's gone. That was nothing but a wealth transfer from you to someone further ahead in the ranks of the Ponzi scheme that you've all been drafted into. The system as it stands is set for collapse, with bailouts and massive devaluation of national currencies along the way, and that's before we consider the likely increases in longevity above and beyond the prediction models presently in use:

An IMF analysis says advanced economies would need to set aside half of their GDP today to pay for a three-year increase in longevity that is actuarially likely by 2050. ... Over the past several decades, governments have consistently underestimated longevity projections and thus have underestimated their pension liabilities. If people live just three years more than expected in 2050, which is in line with the average underestimates of the recent past, the funding gap to pay retirement benefits would be 1% to 2% per year - an amount equal to 50% of 2010 GDP. This gain in longevity will come as a huge shock to public and private pension schemes that are already woefully underfunded.

The point being this: don't look to the future thinking that anyone else is going to pay your way right at the point when it would be peachy keen to have funds for those new medical technologies that will reverse some of the aspects of your age-related degeneration. For one, do you really want to be just another grasping pawn in this vast game of generational theft, and for two, the odds are that the game will be over before you have the chance to do anything other than pay for someone else's increased standard of living. So make your own plans: save, save, save, and invest wisely.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Nature comments on recent advances: "At the turn of the twentieth century, the promise of regenerating damaged tissue was so far-fetched that Thomas Hunt Morgan, despairing that his work on earthworms could ever be applied to humans, abandoned the field to study heredity instead. Though he won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work on the role of chromosomes in inheritance, if he lived today, the advances in regenerative medicine may have tempted him to reconsider. Three studies published this week show that introducing new cells into mice can replace diseased cells - whether hair, eye or heart - and help to restore the normal function of those cells. These proof-of-principle studies now have researchers setting their sights on clinical trials to see if the procedures could work in humans. ... You can grow cells in a Petri dish, but that's not regenerative medicine. You have to think about the biology of repair in a living system. ... Japanese researchers grew different types of hair on nude mice, using stem cells from normal mice and balding humans to recreate the follicles from which hair normally emerges. ... A second study using regenerative techniques helped to restore some vision to mice with congenital stationary night blindness, an inherited disease of the retina. ... [Researchers reprogrammed] cardiac fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes - the muscle cells of the heart that are permanently lost after a heart attack. The team used a retrovirus to deliver three transcription factors that induced the reprogramming in adult mice, and improved their cardiac function. ... These three papers are just the tip of the iceberg. By the time we grow old, doctors are going to look back and say, 'Can you believe people used to go bald, go blind or even have their leg cut off from vascular disease?' - and then the doctor will treat the problem with an injection of cells."

Link: http://www.nature.com/news/regenerative-medicine-repairs-mice-from-top-to-toe-1.10472

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Researchers are not having as much success as they'd like in finding unambiguous associations between specific genes and human longevity - studies are turning up results, but few are similar between populations, indicating that the genetics of natural variations in longevity are probably very complex: "It has long been thought that related individuals share a familial predisposition to longevity, and for more than a century numerous studies have investigated the degree to which human longevity might be an inherited characteristic. Most studies of this type have reported small (?10%) to moderate (?30%) heritability of human longevity, amid differences in definitions of longevity, methods of measuring it, ascertaining individuals who demonstrate it, and in various behavioral and environmental settings. These methodological differences likely account for much of the variation in the resulting estimates of the heritability of longevity. ... We identified individuals from a large multigenerational population database (the Utah Population Database) who exhibited high levels of both familial longevity and individual longevity. This selection identified 325 related 'affected individuals', defined as those in the top quartile for both excess longevity (EL=observed lifespan - expected lifespan) and familial excess longevity (FEL=weighted average EL across all relatives). A whole-genome scan for genetic linkage was performed on this sample using a panel of 1100 microsatellite markers. A strongly suggestive peak was observed in the vicinity of D3S3547 on chromosome 3p24.1, at a point nearly identical to that reported recently by an independent team of researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMS). ... Corroboration of the linkage of exceptional longevity to 3p22-24 greatly strengthens the case that genes in this region affect variation in longevity and suggest, therefore, an important role in the regulation of human lifespan. Future efforts should include intensive study of the 3p22-24 region."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323558/

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

From Queen Mary, University of London, investigation of the mechanisms of periodontitis in aging: "New research [sheds] light on why gum disease can become more common with old age. The study, published in Nature Immunology, reveals that the deterioration in gum health which often occurs with increasing age is associated with a drop in the level of a chemical called Del-1. The researchers say that understanding more about Del-1 and its effects on the body's immune system could help in the treatment or prevention of serious gum disease. ... As people age they are more likely to suffer from inflammatory diseases, including gum disease. The new research investigated gum disease in young and old mice and found that an increase in gum disease in the older animals was accompanied by a drop in the level of Del-1. This protein is known to restrain the immune system by stopping white blood cells from sticking to and attacking mouth tissue. Mice that had no Del-1 developed severe gum disease and elevated bone loss and researchers found unusually high levels of white blood cells in the gum tissue. When they treated the gums of the mice with Del-1, the number of white blood cells dropped, and gum disease and bone loss were reduced. The researchers say their findings could be the basis for a new treatment or prevention of gum disease."

Link: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/smd/71770.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Via EurekAlert!: "Daily physical exercise may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, even in people over the age of 80 ... The study showed that not only exercise but also activities such as cooking, washing the dishes and cleaning are associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease. These results provide support for efforts to encourage physical activity in even very old people who might not be able to participate in formal exercise but can still benefit from a more active lifestyle. ... For the study, a group of 716 people with an average age of 82 wore an actigraph, a device that monitors activity, on their non-dominant wrist continuously for 10 days. All exercise and non-exercise was recorded. They also were given annual tests during the four-year study that measured memory and thinking abilities. During the study, 71 people developed Alzheimer's disease. ... The research found that people in the bottom 10 percent of daily physical activity were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as people in the top 10 percent of daily activity. The study also showed that those people in the bottom 10 percent of intensity of physical activity were almost three times as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as people in the top 10 percent of intensity of physical activity."

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/aaon-gmd041012.php

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

From Depressed Metabolism: "The debilitating effects of a stroke are the result of the (delayed) neuronal death that follows an ischemic insult to the brain. In cryonics, biochemical or freezing damage to cells does not necessarily produce irreversible cell death because damaged cells are stabilized by cold temperatures. As such, morphological preservation of brain cells can co-exist with loss of viability. Therefore, securing viability of brain cells is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for resuscitation of cryonics patients. Future cell repair technologies are assumed to infer the original viable state of the cells from their morphological properties. This does not mean that conventional stroke research does not have any relevance for evaluating the technical feasibility of cryonics. Extensive delays between the pronouncement of legal death and the start of cryonics procedures could alter the structural properties of cells to such a degree that meaningful resuscitation is even problematic with advanced nanomedical cell repair technologies. This is one of the reasons why Alcor complements the cryopreservation process with stabilization procedures to secure viability of the brain after pronouncement of legal death."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2010/07/27/how-many-neurons-need-to-survive-for-cryonics-to-work/

Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

Raised levels of heat shock proteins can protect against sarcopenia, age-related loss of muscle mass and strength: "HSP10 (Heat Shock Protein), helps monitor and organise protein interactions in the body, and responds to environmental stresses, such as exercise and infection, by increasing its production inside cells. Researchers [found] that excessive amounts of HSP10 inside mitochondria - 'organs' that act as energy generators in cells - can [preserve] muscle strength. ... We studied the role of HSP10 inside mitochondria, as it is here that unstable chemicals are produced which can harm parts of the cell. The damage caused by this is thought to play an important part in the ageing process, in which skeletal muscle becomes smaller and weaker and more susceptible to stress damage. In response to these stresses HSP10 increases its levels and helps cells resist damage and recover more effectively. Our research is the first to demonstrate that age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass is not inevitable." The article is sadly sensationalist, overhyping a slowing of muscle loss as "halting the aging process" when it is of course no such thing. It is unfortunate that university publicists feel the need to do this - it only makes them and the researchers they promote look foolish.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.physorg.com/news193913231.html

Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

Specializing in Integrative Medicine

Our vision at Longevity Health Center is to provide the most technologically advanced modalities in a warm, caring environment. The paradigm of integrative medicine is one of partnership between the practitioner and patient. Longevity Health Center is comprised of a dedicated staff and support personnel. We are sensitive to your individual needs and strive to ensure that you have the best experience possible. Our comprehensive services utilize the latest equipment and result-oriented techniques to assist you in achieving optimal health. We recognize that good health is more than just an absence of symptoms. It is our heartfelt desire that you be whole in body, mind, and spirit. We will educate and thereby empower you to make healthy choices as you integrate our recommendations into your life.

Check out our August Newsletterfor more of this month's news and articles of interest!

Schedule a Massage, Lymph Therapy, Acupuncture or FSM treatment with one of our new practitioners (Andrea, Kate or Nancy) in August, and receive a complimentary foot bath! Call for details and scheduling.

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Your lysosomes are recycling units, but their function slowly fails with age - meaning your cells degrade as they fill with waste and junk. More rapid and selective lysosomal failure in brain cells is implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative conditions. Here, researchers dig more deeply: "Neurodegenerative disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, are a devastating group of conditions that exact a heavy toll on patients and their families. ... Research over the past two decades has strongly suggested that a fundamental problem in affected nerve cells relates to accumulation of cellular 'garbage,' or proteins and other material that is too old to function properly. Thus, understanding how the neuron handles these outdated molecules is of great significance. Here we find that upregulation of one such cellular degrading pathway, the lysosome, can have significant deleterious effects to the neuron. We specifically show that expanding the lysosomal compartment can markedly increase production of a very toxic form of tau, a protein strongly implicated in neuronal dysfunction and death in Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. Our findings have important implications for the development of neurodegenerative disease therapies that seek to manipulate the lysosome and the proteins within the lysosome." Therapies that can repair failing lysosomes may have general application to rejuvenation medicine - so the more groups working on that, the better.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2904797/

Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

Air date 04/25/2015

Dr. Mixon responds to your calls. Know when anticholinergic drugs can predispose you to Alzheimers. Discover what makes gelatin work to lower incidents of degenerative joint disease and loss of cartilage with osteoarthritis. Learn the significance of estrogen in the body and how this differs from estrogen-positive breast cancer. Hear about theanine and LMCs Stress Guard in providing quality sleep. Note the dangers of visceral fat. Check all these on this weeks Leading Edge Medicine.

Air date 04/25/2015

Dr. Mixon responds to your calls. Hear the new stuffs discovered on the old drug metformin. Find out why diabetics develop gastroparesis. Discover what glioblastoma is. Gain additional knowledge on the dietary change involved in the LMC dementia protocol. Know the importance of HSCRP. Note the concerning effects of Ambiem in the older population. Gain information on trazadone in relation to improving quality of sleep. Check all these on this weeks Leading Edge Medicine.

Air date 04/18/2015

Dr. Mixon responds to your calls. Get additional information on Advil as ibuprofen regarding the risk of bleeding into the gat. Understand the growth cycle of hair follicle in correcting thyroid dysfunction. Note the omegas and medium-change triglycerides in obtaining healthy hair. Listen to documentations on Tubastatin and Zolpidem in relation to memory loss. See the importance of having an ideal creatine level in the body. Check all these on this weeks Leading Edge Medicine.

Air date 04/18/2015

Originally posted here:
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Our naturopathic physicians are specially trained in many healing modalities and have the experience to effectively apply these treatments for many health concerns.Our office has long been recognized as the premier naturopathic clinic in Arizona for specialty medical services such as integrative cancer care, women's health care and hormone replacement therapy, prostate cancer risk assessments, autoimmune disease therapy, and allergy elimination. At Longevity Medical there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach, and every patient is treated with a personalized holistic treatment plan.

The healing therapies used at Longevity include: Acupuncture: the history of acupuncturecan be traced back nearly 2500 years. The general theory of acupuncture is based on the premise that there are patterns of energy flow through the body that are essential for health that are called "Qi". Acupuncture is a way to unblock or facilitate the proper flow of Qi in order to achieve. Read more...

Prostate Risk Assessments: Longevity is one of the few clinics in the United States that offers Doppler Ultrasonography of the prostate gland. Doppler ultrasound technology combined with state-of-the-art laboratory testing can provide men with an unparalleled analysis of prostate health. Read more...

Integrative Cancer Care: At Longevity Medical Health Center we offer a variety of ways in which a patient may incorporate alternative and integrative medicine into their cancer treatment plans. It is our philosophy that an optimal treatment plan for cancer should provide much more than a diagnosis and a single course of treatment. Read More

Hormone Replacement Therapy: Our physicians have received specialized training in methods of bio-identical hormone replacement for both men and women. In fact, our physicians are considered experts in HRT and often speak at medical conferences on this very subject. At Longevity we make sure that our patients receive the safest and most effective hormone replacement therapy. Read more on hormone replacement for women or for men...

Pediatrics: Children are our future, and at Longevity we treat each child patient as we do our adult patients: asunique individuals with who benefit most from individualized treatment plans. We are trained in both conventional and alternative medicine to treat children in the best possible manner. Read more...

We are Longevity Medical Health Center, and we are dedicated to improving the lives of our patients by providing high quality individualized health care

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From an interview with Vernor Vinge at Wired: "First of all, I'm all for human life extension. In The Singularity is Near, I think, [Ray Kurzweil] has a nice discussion of the situation that a lot of essayists have where they say, 'Oh, we really don't want that. A wise and philosophical person realizes that life needs be limited, and that's a good thing,' these essayists say. He does a good job of criticizing that point of view, and I certainly agree with that. Furthermore, I think that a human lifespan of a thousand years with post-Singularity technology is easily doable. I think a lifespan of a thousand years would actually - Singularity aside - would do human society and human nature a great deal of good, and don't think it is that difficult, it probably can even be achieved without having a Technological Singularity. Life spans of 10,000 to 100,000 years, then you begin to look at what's involved, the humans that are involved, and how capable a human mind is of absorbing variety. ... The complaint or the criticism here is that the human mind has a certain level of ability to handle different sorts of complexity, and if you believe that you could go 100,000 years and not be turned into a repeating tape loop, well, then let's talk about longer period of time. How about a billion years, or a hundred billion years? At a hundred billion years, you're out there re-engineering the universe. The age of the universe becomes your chief longevity problem. But there's still the issue of, what would it be like to be you after that? This raises the point, which actually I'm sure is also on Ray's mind, that if you're going to last that long you have to become something greater, and the Singularity is ideally set up to supply that. So the people who are into the intelligence amplification mode of looking at these things, this all fits. And I'm not saying that in a critical and negative way, it does all fit, and it puts you in a situation where you are talking realistically about living very long periods of time, perhaps so long that you have to re-engineer the universe because the universe is not long-lived enough. At the same time, you have to be growing and growing and growing. I mean, intellectually growing. Now, if you look at that situation, it ultimately gets you, I think, to a very interesting philosophical point, which really I don't think was within the horizon of what people normally thought about two or three or four hundred years ago."

Link: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/vernor-vinge-geeks-guide-galaxy/

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

The SENS Foundation research community is steadily gathering momentum in their work on biotechnologies that, once fully realized, will be capable of rejuvenating the old - restoring youthful health, vigor, and function to the formerly declining organs and biological systems in the body. Even before then, the first applications resulting from SENS research will have a significant impact on health and age-related disease, achieved by partially reversing some of the root causes of aging. To go along with the recently released 2011 annual report, the SENS Foundation staff have also published their 2011 research report (in PDF format):

The subtitle on our logo banner reads "advancing rejuvenation biotechnologies", and in keeping with the dynamic connotations of that statement, we've spent 2011 engaged in focused, concrete actions toward embodying it. ... We're excited to be a part of this revolution in scientific innovation, grateful to everyone who has supported us through their generous gifts of time and funding, and delighted to have multiple exciting developments to report on the research front.

There is a lot of material in the report, and I encourage you to read the whole thing - it's very approachable for the layperson, and a good way to obtain a top to bottom view of the Foundation's research strategy at present. That more or less encompasses these questions: what exactly causes aging, and what can be done here and now to make progress towards preventing it and reversing it? For example, here's an excerpt from the GlycoSENS category, research with the potential to reverse the cause of much of the chemical and structural aging of skin, blood vessel walls, and many forms of connective tissue:

The elasticity of the artery wall, the flexibility of the lens of the eye, and the high tensile strength of the ligaments are examples of tissues that rely on maintaining their proper structure. But chemical reactions with other molecules in the extracellular space occasionally result in a chemical bond (a so-called crosslink) between two nearby proteins that were previously free-moving, impairing their ability to slide across or along each other and thereby impairing function. It is the goal of this project to identify chemicals that can react with these crosslinks and break them without reacting with anything that we don't want to break.

...

In 2011, we established a Center of Excellence for GlycoSENS and other rejuvenation research at Cambridge University and hired postdoctoral student Rhian Grainger to design and perform experiments to develop reagents that can detect proteins bearing glucosepane crosslinks, facilitating further studies on its structure, abundance, and cleavage by small molecules. We also established a collaboration with researchers at Yale University, who will lend their expertise in generating advanced glycation end-products and lead efforts in developing agents which may be able to cleave glucosepane.

There are other projects recently started by the Foundation in other areas of the SENS program. You'll also find progress reports for the work that has been ongoing for some years: the MitoSENS project to block the contribution of mitochondrial DNA damage to aging, and the LysoSENS biomedical remediation work that is a search for enzymes to safely remove the build up of damaging compounds that the body's recycling mechanisms cannot cope with on their own.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm