More proof that Precision Medicine can predict and solve complex health issues.
Brain scans could help predict response to psychotherapy for anxiety and depression.
Continue reading “Progress toward personalized treatments” »
Removing Glucosepane crosslinks from tissue is one of the most important things groups like SENS Research Foundation are doing and their progress relies on our support.
In this interesting open access paper, the authors propose that too little attention has been given to immune cell behavior in tissues rather than in blood, and that means that researchers have overlooked the possibility that age-related changes in the extracellular matrix structures that support tissues might be a significant cause of the growing immune dysfunction that takes place in later life. One of the more important of these changes in the extracellular matrix is the growing presence of cross-links, persistent sugary compounds produced as a byproduct of normal metabolic operations that chain together the large molecules of the extracellular matrix. In doing so these cross-links change the chemical and structural properties of the matrix and the tissue as a whole, producing results such as loss of elasticity in skin and blood vessels, which in turn contribute to a variety of age-related diseases. If cross-linking does indeed contribute to immunosenescence, the decline of the immune system with age, then that only increases the importance of ongoing research funded by the SENS Research Foundation aimed at safely breaking down this unwanted form of metabolic waste. In humans near all persistent cross-links appear to involve a single class of compound, glucosepane. So in theory there is only a single target here, needing just one drug development program to make a large difference to long-term health and longevity.
Excercise is the best low cost activity you can do as part of your personal longevity strategy. Here we see data showing it can improve resistance to oxidative stress.
Researchers digging deeper into the mechanisms by which exercise produces benefits have found that it improves the resistance of blood vessels to oxidative stress. With age the presence of oxidizing molecules and oxidative modification of proteins, preventing correct function, increases for reasons that include damage to mitochondria, the power plants of the cell. Oxidative damage to molecular machinery is somewhere in the middle of the chain of cause and effect that starts with fundamental forms of damage to cells and tissues and spirals down into age-related diseases. Near all of this oxidation is repaired very quickly, the damaged molecules dismantled and recycled, but in most contexts more of it over the long term is worse than less of it.
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Yes, renewable energy technologies exist. But solar power, the one with arguably the most promise for significant, scalable deployment, is intermittent. Although the sun provides more energy in one hour than humans consume in a year, we can only tap into this power when the sun is shining. At least, that’s been the predominant school of thought.
But since the 1960s, a group of researchers from NASA and the Pentagon have been thinking outside the box — or in this case, outside the atmosphere. Solar power captured in outer space would not be limited by nighttime hours or cloud cover. And — unlike 23 percent of current incoming solar energy — it wouldn’t be absorbed by water vapor, dust and ozone before reaching us. Finally, because space solar is constant, it wouldn’t need to be stored, which can lead to energy losses of up to 50 percent. In other words, taking our solar panels from the ground to the cosmos could be a great deal more efficient. It may also be key to humanity’s survival.
“In countries right now where they’re trying to deal with poverty, water scarcity, poor health, lack of education and political instability — these are all things you need energy in order to fight,” Paul Jaffe, PhD, spacecraft engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, said in a recent TakeApart story. Or, as John C. Mankins, founder of Mankins Space Technology and author of “The Case for Space Based Solar,” told Salon, “In the long run, renewable large-scale energy sources such as space solar power are essential to sustaining industrial civilization, and the long and increasingly high quality of lives that we enjoy.”
In Brief
Though aging seems like one of the most natural things, an affair common to all living creatures, the process is actually poorly understood by scientists. A new study detailed in Nature aims to shed light on the phenomenon as a research team led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has uncovered a relationship between lifespan and RNA splicing, a core function of cells that allows a single gene to produce a variety of proteins.
The researchers already knew that mutations in RNA splicing could lead to disease, but they wanted to find out if the act of splicing itself had an impact on the aging process. To find out, they designed experimental setups using the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which show visible signs of aging during their short three-week lifespan.
Continue reading “A New Aging Discovery Could Allow Humans to Extend Their Lifespan” »
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that mental health professionals have smarter tools than ever before, with artificial intelligence-related technology coming to the forefront to help diagnose patients, often with much greater accuracy than humans.
A new study published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, for example, showed that machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in identifying a suicidal person. The research, led by John Pestian, a professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, involved 379 teenage patients from three area hospitals.
Continue reading “New AI Mental Health Tools Beat Human Doctors at Assessing Patients” »
AI (someday once things are more secured) is going to drastically reduce our cost of government. At least the VA believes AI is going to make them better at treating folks; my guess it’s a mix of cost saving potential via automation and improving diagnosis.
Flow Health and the VA are building a medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train AI to personalize care plans.
Wearable fitness devices could help you with your personal longevity strategy.
NEW YORK — Activity monitors could improve our health and extend our lives — if only we could be motivated to use them. Those are the conclusions of two new studies about the promise and perils of relying on fitness trackers to measure and guide how we move.
The monitors, which are expected to be a popular holiday gift again this year, can generally track our steps, speed, stance (sitting or not), distance, energy expenditure and heart rate. The absolute accuracy of these numbers, however, is somewhat suspect, with past studies finding errors in many of the monitors’ measurements. But the inaccuracies are usually consistent, the studies show, so the trackers can reliably indicate how our movements change from day to day.
Continue reading “Fitness trackers might help us live longer” »
You get out what you put in.
You are what you eat, the old saying goes, but why is that so? Researchers have known for some time that diet affects the balance of microbes in our bodies, but how that translates into an effect on the host has not been understood. Now, research in mice is showing that microbes communicate with their hosts by sending out metabolites that act on histones—thus influencing gene transcription not only in the colon but also in tissues in other parts of the body. The findings publish November 23 in Molecular Cell.
“This is the first of what we hope is a long, fruitful set of studies to understand the connection between the microbiome in the gut and its influence on host health,” says John Denu, a professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the study’s senior authors. “We wanted to look at whether the gut microbiota affect epigenetic programming in a variety of different tissues in the host.” These tissues were in the proximal colon, the liver, and fat tissue.
Continue reading “Changes in the diet affect epigenetics via the microbiota” »
