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Senior Citizen Statistics & Longevity
National Institutes of Health Looking for Families
that Live Long, Healthy Lives
July 20, 2006 Do people in your family live long,
healthy lives? If, "Yes," the National Institutes of Health wants to hear
from you. They think longevity tends to run in families and they want to
learn more about factors that contribute to it.
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on
Senior Statistics
& Longevity |
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The Long Life Family Study (LLFS), developed by the
NIH's National Institute on Aging (NIA), is now recruiting families to
participate in this study.
This study will be conducted by researchers at
three sites in the United States and one in Denmark. Potential U.S.
participants will be recruited from areas close to the LLFS study
centers at
● Columbia University in New York City,
● University of Pittsburgh and
● Boston University.
Potential Danish participants will be recruited by
researchers at the University of Southern Denmark, using information
from the Danish National Population Registry. Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis will act as the Data Management and
Coordinating Center.
LLFS researchers are seeking a large number of
families with several long-lived members for this study and are
particularly interested in hearing from families with at least two
living members aged 80 years or older and their living children who
reside near the study site locations of Pittsburgh, Boston or New York.
Trained clinical staff members will meet with study
participants to ask questions about their family and health history and
conduct some performance and physical assessments. Study participants
will also be asked for a small blood sample to obtain genetic
information to help determine the role that genes might play in long
healthy survival, in addition to many other factors.
Other studies have indicated that longevity tends
to run in families. The planned LLFS is designed to determine the
genetic and environmental factors that contribute to longevity and to
the ability to escape diseases normally associated with aging such as
Alzheimers disease, cancer, stroke and heart disease, said Richard J.
Hodes, M.D., NIA director.
Winifred K. Rossi, deputy director of NIAs
Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology Program and the NIA program official
for the five-year, $18 million project said, Families are often very
proud of their long-lived relatives. This study will provide the
opportunity for long-lived families to share information about their
lives that contributes to their long and healthy survival. The knowledge
gained from these families can help us understand what makes them unique
and can lead to scientific insights to help other people improve the
length of time they spend in good health.
The scientific results of the study will be made
public once the information obtained is analyzed, said Rossi. The
privacy of study participants and their information will be carefully
protected, she emphasized.
The studys lead investigators, prominent in
longevity and genetic research, are:
● Thomas Perls, M.D., Ph.D., director of the New
England Centenarian Study and Associate Professor of Medicine,
Geriatrics Section, Department of Medicine, Boston University, Boston;
● Richard Mayeux, M.D., Gertrude H. Sergievsky
Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia
University and director of the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the
co-director of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease
and the Aging Brain, New York;
● Anne B. Newman, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of
Epidemiology and Medicine in the Department of Epidemiology at the
University of Pittsburgh;
● James W. Vaupel, Ph.D., Executive Director of
the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany,
and director of the Program on Population, Policy and Aging at the Terry
Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University, Durham, N. C.;
Kaare Christensen, M.D., Ph.D, Professor of
Epidemiology, Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern
Denmark and senior research scientist at the Terry Sanford Institute of
Public Policy at Duke University, Durham, N. C. and,
● Michael A. Province, Ph.D., Professor of
Genetics and Biostatistics, and Director of the Division of Statistical
Genomics in the Genome Sciences Center of Washington University in St.
Louis, Mo.
Interested parties should call the local LLFS
recruitment offices at the following numbers:
● Boston University: 1-888-333-6327
● University of Pittsburgh: 1-800-872-3653
● Columbia University: 1-800-304-4317
For more information on the Long Life Family Study,
visit the website at
www.longlifefamilystudy.org.
NIA, part of the National Institutes of Health,
leads the federal effort supporting and conducting research on aging and
the health and well-being of older people. For more information on
health and aging, visit the NIA website,
www.nia.nih.gov or call the NIA Information Center at
1-800-222-2225.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) - the
nation's medical research agency - includes 27 institutes and centers
and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic,
clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the
causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For
more information about NIH and its programs, visit
www.nih.gov.
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