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Category: life extension – Page 2

Cellular recycling changes with age, but not how we expected

Taking out the trash is a chore that even our cells cannot escape. Through a process known as autophagy, they place misshapen proteins and other cellular garbage in biological containers to digest them into their molecular building blocks.

Autophagy is designed to prevent the buildup of waste that causes cellular damage. A decline in this cellular recycling process is considered one of the hallmarks of aging and is associated with many age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and neurodegeneration.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute published findings in Aging Cell adding new wrinkles to our understanding of the links between aging and autophagy.

Novel ‘speech clock’ can estimate a person’s chronological age

A large study shows that machine-learning clocks based on speech can estimate chronological age and may also offer a window into brain aging, biological aging, cognitive health, cumulative burden, and dementia.

The new study, just published in leading international journal Science Advances, outlines that researchers have developed a “speech clock” that can estimate a person’s chronological age from hundreds of acoustic and linguistic characteristics of their speech. The difference between a person’s actual age and their speech-predicted age (called the speech age gap) was also associated with multiple independent markers of biological aging, brain health, cognition, social adversity, and dementia.

The study analyzed 2,928 Spanish-speaking participants from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, including healthy adults and people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and different forms of frontotemporal dementia. Rather than looking at a single property of the voice, the researchers used machine learning to analyse hundreds of features capturing how people speak and what they say: incorporating speech rate and pauses, pitch, emotional content, vocabulary, semantic precision, and the amount and organisation of verbal output. Machine-learning models combined these features to estimate chronological age and generate an individual speech age gap.

Hearing aids show promise for cognitive recovery, but dementia prevention remains unproven

People who live long enough have a high chance of losing some of their hearing as they grow older. By age 60, about one in three adults has presbycusis, an age-related decline in hearing caused by changes inside the ear, including the loss of sensory hair cells and damage to the auditory nerve. Hearing aids can help bring sounds back into reach, making conversations easier to follow and helping older adults stay connected with the people around them. Some studies have found that hearing loss is linked to a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

A recent study from China explored whether treating hearing loss with hearing aids could do more than improve hearing, potentially slowing the progression from mild cognitive problems to dementia-level impairment.

The researchers designed the two-year CHOICE trial (Chinese Hearing Solution for Improvement of Cognition in Elders) to track changes in cognitive impairment among 703 participants with both moderate-to-severe hearing loss and mild cognitive problems. Participants were randomly split into two groups: One half received hearing aids, and the other half received health education on hearing care and cognitive health.

The hidden switch behind one of the biggest paradoxes in aging muscle

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have resolved the paradox of why aging muscles weaken despite an increased proportion of durable, slow-twitch fibers. The study reveals that this fiber-type transition is a protective response to age-related mitochondrial damage, specifically driven by a decline in cardiolipin, a crucial mitochondrial lipid. This depletion triggers increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, which signals the protein ERRγ to reprogram fast-twitch muscle fibers into slow-twitch ones, effectively sacrificing muscle power for cellular protection. Notably, preclinical experiments demonstrated that partially restoring cardiolipin levels reverses this age-related muscle tissue loss, highlighting a promising therapeutic target for mitigating sarcopenia and age-related muscle decline.

Scientists in the Gerhart-Hines Group pinpoint a molecular cause of muscle aging, and a possible fix. By investigating how muscles adapt to age and disease-related decline, the scientists discovered the involvement of a druggable nuclear receptor, ERRγ, that could be targeted to preserve muscle function. The findings were published in Nature Aging.

Could mushrooms save the world?

Mycologist Paul Stamets explains what fungi do for the planet and how they could be used to correct many of the problems that ail us.

Mycologist Paul Stamets wears a cool Indiana Jones-like hat, fitting for a researcher who is adored like a rock star by fans of his work. The hat is made from a mushroom – birch polypore – but it’s not the only mushroom Stamets has brought to the studio with him. Tucked into his backpack is a huge, 40-pound mushroom called Agarikon, which looks a bit like a beehive.

“It’s really hard. It sounds like wood; it feels like wood; it’s the longest living mushroom in the world,” Stamets explains.

Could Earth’s Magnetic Field Be Secretly Influencing How We Age?

A longer life with a physical cost

For the study, published in Aging, the team used a specially designed shielding system to reduce the magnetic field surrounding the flies to near zero. They tested healthy flies alongside flies carrying a defect in Pink1, a gene associated with inherited early-onset Parkinson’s disease in humans. Comparing the two groups allowed them to investigate how flies with impaired mitochondrial function responded to the same environmental change.

The Pink1 flies lived about 20% longer under magnetic shielding, but their physical performance declined. Healthy flies showed improved movement along with changes in their health span, or the time spent in good health. The results suggest that an animal’s metabolic state helps determine its response to magnetic field strength, with longer survival and better physical function not necessarily going together.

No Time But Now

What if the future of cancer treatment isn’t about killing the last cancer cell… but finding the first one?

For more than 40 years, renowned oncologist Dr. Azra Raza has pursued this radical idea.

This Wednesday on No Time But Now, Dr. Raza, a Columbia University Irving Medical Center physician and professor, joins William Shatner and Melanie Shatner Gretsch for a powerful conversation about the future of cancer detection, the technology that could transform medicine, and the deeply human realities of grief, hope, mortality, and making every moment count.

Presented by LifeWave Corporate.

Don’t miss this conversation.

🎙️ NO TIME BUT NOW New episode drops Wednesday.

http://www.notimebutnow.com http://www.lifewavehealth.com.

Continue reading “No Time But Now” | >

The natural flavonoid dihydromyricetin targets senescent cells via PRDX2 and alleviates age-related diseases

Aging is companied by a progressive decline of physiological functions. Here, the authors report that dihydromyricetin, a plant derived dietary supplement, generates senotherapeutic effects and shows great promise to ameliorate age-related conditions via pharmaceutical intervention.

Cancer cells erase sections of Y chromosome to trigger tumor growth in men

A new study found that cancer cells selectively chip away gene-rich sections of the Y chromosome, triggering ripples that regulate tumor growth.

Co-led by University of Arizona Cancer Center physician-scientist Dr. Dan Theodorescu, the paper, “Recurrent deletions and regulatory disruption of the Y chromosome in cancer,” was published in the journal Communications Biology.

Each cell in men’s bodies usually contains one X and one Y chromosome. The Y chromosome has long been known to determine male sex, but researchers are learning its genes also play other roles in cells throughout the body. “Loss of Y” is a common genetic change in aging men, often found in blood cells. Y loss also occurs in cancer cells themselves, which is the focus of this study.

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