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Never Dying? Scientist Envisions Therapies Creating
Longevity Escape
Experts at AAAS
briefing don't all agree on the outer limits of the human lifespan
 Feb. 20, 2006 - Imagine living to age 1,000 in a
middle-aged body. Fantasy? Yes, for now. But recent genetic and
molecular biological discoveries have dramatically extended the lifespan
of several experimental animals, including mice and worms, and could
have potential applications for increasing longevity in humans. One
scientist sees the possibility of adding 25 years with 25 years of new
therapies.
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Related Stories |
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Longer Life Will Add Host of Social, Economic
Challenges
Between 2010 and 2030 age of death may increase
by 20 years with anti-aging therapies
Feb. 20, 2006 - In the 21st century,
state-of-the-art anti-aging technologies may extend human lifespans at
an unprecedented rate, bringing with them a host of social and economic
challenges, says biologist Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University.
Read more...
Simple Test for Seniors, Boomers to Rate Risk of
Dying in Four Years
Researches say all 50
or over can do it by answering just 12 questions
Feb. 16, 2006 - Researchers at the San Francisco VA
Medical Center have created an index that is 81 percent accurate in
predicting the likelihood of death within four years for Baby Boomers
and senior citizens age 50 and older. See charts below for taking test,
life expectancy tables, determining body mass index).
Read more...
How Do Seniors Define Successful Aging?
Older adults perspectives on healthy aging surprises
many
Jan. 18, 2006 - Understanding how older adults
define successful aging is a critical component to the well-being and
quality of life for this burgeoning population. A study published in the
January edition of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
concluded that despite having chronic illnesses and some disability most
community-dwelling senior citizens saw themselves as aging successfully.
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Senior Citizens Enjoying Health, Life Much Longer
than Expected
Most common health problems reported were poor
vision, hearing loss and mood
Dec. 28, 2005 - Older Americans enjoy good health
for a longer period than previously realized, and many factors that
compromise health in the elderly can be modified to maintain their
health, according to recent findings from a large multi-university study led
by Duke University Medical Center. Consequently, researchers said,
physicians should understand that long spans of illness and disability
are not necessarily part of normal aging.
Read more...
Ecuador Grabs Oldest Person Crown from U.S.
Guinness confirms 116 year old as oldest but Chicago
woman may be 118
Dec. 20, 2005 – Major changes are occurring in the
list of supercenternarians and oldest living people of the world, as a
116 year old woman from Ecuador is given the title of "oldest" by
Guinness World Records, displacing American Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden,
who is just 115. The battle is not over, however, as a woman in Chicago
is alleged to be 118.
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Senior Citizens to be 15 Percent of World Population
Dec. 7, 2005 - This century, the world is expected
to experience an unprecedented aging of the human population in
countries worldwide. Analysts predict significant implications for
economic growth and the well-being of societies. Following is a report
by the Voice of America on what the experts say it will mean.
Read more...
More People are Living Longer but None Has Reached
123
U.S. leads the world with four oldest people
including women and a Puerto Rican man
By Tucker Sutherland, editor
Dec. 3, 2005 – The Yemen Observer reported last
week on a man there that claims to be 130 years old. There is apparently
no way to verify his age and Saeed Bin Saeed Al-Humri will most likely
disappear among many others, particularly from countries that did little
years ago to document births, who have claimed to be the oldest living
person. Officially, no person has ever celebrated a 123rd birthday.
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Chances of Joining Centenarians Best for First Born
Daughters of Farmers
Also helps with birthday in January, raised on farm
in the West
Nov. 8, 2005 – Centenarians (people living to age
100) represent one of the fastest-growing age groups in America -
increasing by 4.1 percent a year. But, if you want to be a member of
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from a large family, have a birthday in January and were raised on a
farm in the West.
Read more...
Read more on
Aging or
Senior Statistics. |
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New research promises dramatic possibilities, such
as — in the words of scientist
Aubrey de Grey — postponing aging “indefinitely.” De Grey, a
scientist from the University of Cambridge, contends that within 25
years there is a 50 percent chance of creating therapies which would
give middle-aged people an extra 25 years of life.
De Grey is increasingly visible in the news media,
and controversial among his colleagues. Many scientists believe that
there are good reasons to doubt the imminent development of such
therapies, and point out that there are potential drawbacks and
side-effects to consider.
A panel of experts discussed the future of the
human life span on Friday at the 2006 AAAS Annual Meeting, and also
examined the potential demographic and economic effects which such
life-extension measures could have.
De Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who studies the
biological and medical aspects of old age and the process of aging,
believes aging may be postponed by repairing the “damage,” or the
cellular and molecular “side-effects” that accompany metabolism.
“My view is that it would be much easier to repair
and reverse, or at least to make harmless, those molecular and cellular
things that are happening with aging rather than to prevent them in the
first place,” he said.
To that end he has developed a comprehensive plan,
entitled “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), which
categorizes seven basic types of “damage” and groups each with a
proposed repair method. Each type of damage becomes a target for a
proposed therapy. For example, one category includes cell loss and cell
atrophy, which de Grey proposes to repair or obviate by implementing
stem cells, growth factors and exercise.
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de Grey envisions a day when therapeutic techniques improve more
quickly than a person approaches death — thus reaching what he
terms “longevity escape velocity.” If society ever reaches this
point, he predicts, individuals may “never die from old age.” |
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The proposed repair methods are technologies and
therapeutics he believes may be sufficiently improved in the near future
to effectively postpone getting old. Some therapies include new research
on telomere modification which could have an impact on one of de Grey’s
SENS targets, “accumulation of chromosomal damage which leads to
cancer.”
Another target, extracellular aggregates, could be
alleviated by immune-mediated phagocytosis, explored recently in mouse
models. Of course most of these therapies have only been achieved with
experimental animals and remain — for the moment — theoretical for
humans.
Nevertheless, de Grey envisions a day when
therapeutic techniques improve more quickly than a person approaches
death — thus reaching what he terms “longevity escape velocity.” If
society ever reaches this point, he predicts, individuals may “never die
from old age.”
But others believe the science of aging to be more
complicated, including 28 scientists who dismissed much of de Grey’s
work as “ill-defined speculation” in a 2005 report to the European
Molecular Biology Organization.
“In our opinion,” writes University of Minnesota
biologist Huber Warner et al, “the items of the SENS programme… are not
yet sufficiently well formulated or justified to serve as a useful
framework for scientific debate, let alone research.”
One of these 28 scientists, Steven Austad, an
expert in mammalian aging and a gerontologist from the University of
Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, acknowledges the significant
discoveries in the realm of experimental anti-aging techniques.
But at the AAAS briefing Friday, he pointed out the
enormous amount of lacking information that would be necessary for any
human application—not to mention the side-effects these sort of
applications could have.
Though we have succeeded in extending life
expectancy, Austad said, there is much to be learned about the actual
process of retarding aging. Some of the experimental animals whose lives
have been extended suffer from significant side effects, such as
susceptibility to infectious disease, reduced fitness and fertility
problems, he said.
Assuming anti-aging therapies could increase life
expectancy in the near future, Stanford biologist Dr. Shripad
Tuljapurkar created a model examining the demographic and economic
effects.
Given a 20-year increase in life expectancy between
2010 and 2030 due to anti-aging therapy — which the panel scientists
consider a “moderate” estimate — the model predicts that there will be
twice as many American retirees relative to working people. Thus, the
dependency ratio would double, as would the cost of Social Security and
Medicare. In order to compensate, Tuljapurkar estimates, the retirement
age would have to climb to 85.
Other notable predictions include an estimated 500
million extra people due to anti-aging technologies in India and China.
Tuljapurkar noted that anti-aging technologies will be expensive and
could therefore produce more inequality in terms of life expectancy,
both between and amongst countries.
In America, for example, where there already exists
the highest level of inequity of age at death, if therapies are paid for
with private resources, inequality could greatly increase, Tuljapurkar
said.
While future models seem bleak to some, Dr. Eileen
M. Crimmins, chair of gerontology at the University of Southern
California, pointed out that there is much to be learned from the past.
It may be more difficult to adjust to abrupt fertility changes than to
anticipated increases in life expectancy due to mortality change, she
said.
Thus, since the developed world has already dealt
with rising and subsequent falling fertility rates, she believes the
future may not be as problematic as some believe.
“Now the question is: What will the adverse
consequences of living a long life be?” she asked. “I think they will
not be anything we cannot deal with… The issue will be adjusting to
those changes with sensible policies which include changing the length
of working life [by increasing the retirement age].”
Some of the debate surrounding anti-aging science
derives from how one defines aging and thus how one goes about treating
it. De Grey, for example, likens the effects of aging to “damage,” and
anti-aging therapies to the maintenance of a house.
“The only real difference between houses and humans
is that we didn’t design our own anatomy,” said de Grey. “We have to
figure out how we work to sufficiently understand what to do in order to
repair or obviate the effects of aging.”
Dr. Austad, however, defines aging more simply —
and therefore envisions anti-aging therapy as more complicated.
“Aging is the progressive decline in function that
virtually every living organism undergoes,” he said. Austad displayed a
graph showing the decline in running speed of the fastest humans over
the course of a lifetime, followed by a graph showing decline in various
organ systems. Austad, like many others, sees SENS’ seven targets as
overly simplistic. And even if they aren’t, problems remain.
Austad brought up the SEN target which includes
tumor cells to illustrate his point. “Curing cancer hasn’t proved to be
too easy,” he said.
Read more news from the AAAS Conference –
click here.
More on this story from UPI at Science Daily -
click here.
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