Life Extension Research

Stay Happy and Save your Life

posted on September 17, 2008

I know a life extensionist who is facing more challenges now than most people face in a lifetime. Yet he remains upbeat and optimistic. I know a person who is not interested in extreme life extension who is crushed by a disruptive, but temporary challenge, which has sunk him into a deep state of depression.

About 90% of the members of the life extension community who I know would fit more in the first profile. They seem to function well in the face of adversity, bounce back from setbacks and are overall, healthier than average.

I find that the majority of people with no interest in extreme life extension tend to react more negatively to challenges, and also tend to be less healthy.

Then I came across an article by Paul J. Rosch, M.D. It illustrated how optimistic people live longer. Here are some excerpts:

Numerous studies support the belief that people with an upbeat and positive perspective tend to be healthier and enjoy longer lives than those who are gloomy and cynical about the future. Always expecting the worst was linked to a 25 percent higher risk of dying before age 65 in a very long-term California study. In another report on senior citizens, researchers rated 1,000 Dutch men and women aged 65-85 with respect to their degree of optimism, health and longevity. Over the next 10 years, participants classified as being very optimistic had 55 percent fewer deaths from all causes and 23 percent less heart-related deaths than highly pessimistic controls.

So Stay Happy and Save Your Life

The article cites study-after-study proving optimism extends your life. For example, Harvard researchers found cardioprotective effects when they followed 1,306 men who had been rated for optimism and pessimism in 1986. During the next 10 years, men reporting high levels of optimism had almost half the risk of suffering any coronary complications compared to peers classified as being very pessimistic.

Optimists and happy people may also be less likely to suffer a stroke according to a University of Texas study of 2,478 senior citizens. Researchers confirmed that increasing depression ratings were associated with a significantly higher incidence of stroke.

Similar rewards were reported in a study of 600 people over age 50 in a small Ohio town in 1975. Researchers found that optimists who viewed aging as a positive experience lived about 7.5 years longer than participants with a much darker perspective. One might argue that people in poorer health would be more apt to have negative responses and also be more likely to die over the next 23 years.

However, even when health, socioeconomic status, overall morale, loneliness, race, sex, and other possible confounding factors were taken into account, a positive view of aging was still highly correlated with significantly increased longevity. Indeed, this advantage was far greater than that afforded by lowering blood pressure or reducing cholesterol, each of which was found to lengthen life about four years.

In a Mayo Clinic study, optimists:

• Had fewer limitations due to physical health.
• Had less pain.
• Felt more energetic most of the time.
• Felt more peaceful and happy most of the time.
• Had fewer problems with work or other daily activities as a result of their emotional state.

 

If you’d like to see the whole article, go to:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2005/09/03/why-do-happy-people-and-optimists-live-longer.aspx

Over and over, I see evidence of how attitude contributes to health and longevity. If you look for the correlation, you’ll find it too. But more importantly, look within.
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TELOMERE LENGTH: HEALTH OR AGING?

Telomeres are protective caps on your chromosomes that shorten with both aging and ill health. What is cause and what is effect?

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001566.php

"There are hints that shortened telomeres might be caused by damage to mitochondria, which is in turn a known root cause of many aspects of degenerative aging. In a recently published study, researchers found that telomere length in the oldest humans is still strongly correlated with health - suggesting that perhaps aging is not the primary correlation.

"This makes more sense if you think of aging as less of a process and more of an accumulation of biochemical damage. Telomere length seems to be a marker for your personal level of damage, possibly by virtue of its connections to one or more of the primary modes of damage. Many questions remain, however, as to where exactly it fits in the grand scheme of cause and effect."

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LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

Moscow News on Kriorus (September 12 2008) http://www.mnweekly.ru/national/20080828/55343651.html
The Moscow News looks at cryonics provider Kriorus, a Russian group that aims to become the Alcor of their country: "established in 2005 with the help of the Russian Transhumanist Movement, the devotees of which believe in the process of humans becoming 'posthumans' - beings capable of waiving aging and death, and forever forgetting of such problems as disabilities and disease. Such a goal is at present obviously unattainable, but one will find that not just transhumanists or immortalists are striving to complete the research on cryonics - the issue of death and prolonging of life is close to all, and the work on cryonics has been in progress for decades.

The technology of freezing the body available today is considered to be sufficiently developed, and more or less safe; most of the problems associated with freezing living matter - such as ice crystals appearing in cells and thus causing damage - have been solved. However, it is currently impossible to successfully thaw the body or brain without causing some degree of irreparable damage - and even if it were possible, all you'd have would be a corpse. To make the lifeless body come to life, far more advanced know-how is required.  Cryonicists hope not only to reanimate the body [using technologies yet to be developed], but to remove the initial cause of death or any other problems present at the time of death."

Small Steps towards Medical Nanorobots (September 12 2008) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080911185104.htm
As engineered nanoparticles increase in complexity, they will at some point be sophisticated enough to be considered true medical nanorobots. That's still in the future, but you can see that the process is underway:
"Scientists have developed nanometer-sized 'cargo ships' that can sail throughout the body via the bloodstream without immediate detection from the body’s immune radar system and ferry their cargo of anti-cancer drugs and markers into tumors that might otherwise go untreated or undetected. The idea involves encapsulating imaging agents and drugs into a protective 'mother ship' that evades the natural processes that normally would remove these payloads if they were unprotected. These mother ships are only 50 nanometers in diameter, or 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and are equipped with an array of molecules on their surfaces that enable them to find and penetrate tumor cells in the body. We are now constructing the next generation of smart tumor-targeting nanodevices. We hope that these devices will improve the diagnostic imaging of cancer and allow pinpoint targeting of treatments into cancerous tumors."

Targeting Cancer Stem Cells (September 11 2008) http://www.ouhsc.edu/article-display.asp?idnum=1302
Given that researchers are making strong progress in both understanding the biochemistry of stem cells and in targeted cell-killing therapies, I don't expect the cancer stem cell hypothesis to remain a hypothesis for more than another few years. "After years of working toward this goal, scientists [have] found a way to isolate cancer stem cells in tumors so they can target the cells and kill them, keeping cancer from returning. A research team led [discovered] that a particular protein only appears in stem cells. Until now, researchers knew of proteins that appeared in both regular cancer cells and stem cells, but none that just identified a stem cell. The group has already begun work to use the protein as a target for a new compound that once developed would kill the stem cells and kill the cancer. By targeting the stem cells, scientists and physicians also would be able to stop the cancer from returning. Researchers expect to have initial testing completed to begin the first phase of clinical trials within 5 years. The compound, if successful in human trials, is expected to be available to the public within 10 years."

Using Signals Instead of Cells (September 10 2008) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/afst-hes090908.php
Some first generation stem cell therapies seem to work because of the chemical signals emitted by implanted cells. An obvious next step is to only use the signals and skip the cells entirely. EurekAlert! notes a step along that path: "This method, developed in laboratory research with pigs, is the first non-cell based therapeutic application of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). It entails using secretions from stem cells. In their studies with pigs, the researchers found that the administration of secretion from stem cells minimized heart injury by enhancing reperfusion therapy (angioplasty and cardiac bypass surgery) and reducing tissue death by another 60%. Heart function was also markedly improved. Using secretion instead of cells allows us to circumvent many highly intractable problems such as tumour formation, immune compatibility, cell viability, delivery, costs and timeliness." Researchers are still working to understand the signals that drive regeneration, but I imagine that a few years from now we will see tests of artificially produced signal chemicals to stimulate stem cells already present in the body.

Another Glenn Foundation Laboratory (September 09 2008) http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aging-center-0909.html
The Glenn Foundation is funding a new laboratory at MIT, building upon the Harvard laboratory funded a couple of years ago. "The mission of the Glenn Foundation, founded in 1965 by Paul F. Glenn, is to extend the healthy productive years of life through research on the mechanisms of biological aging. The [Foundation] has pledged $5 million over five years to establish a new laboratory in MIT's Department of Biology to study aging. The new Glenn Laboratory for the Science of Aging will be directed by MIT Professor Leonard Guarente, a pioneer in the biology of aging. This generous gift from the Glenn Foundation will enable us to expand and intensify the study of critical regulators of aging, such as sirtuins. This work may lead to interventions to extend the healthy, productive period of our lives and forestall frailty and diseases." Laboratories founded with the explicit mission of addressing aging are an important part of the cultural sea change taking place in the aging research community.

An Update on Catalase in the Mitochondria (September 08 2008) http://pmid.us/18772469
You might recall the demonstration of extended healthy longevity in mice by localizing the antioxidant catalase to the mitochondria - a strategy replicated by other researchers to some success. Here is an update on that work: "We describe the effects of mitochondrially targeted catalase (MCAT) expression on end-of-life pathology in mice using detailed semiquantitative histopathological evaluation. We previously reported that the median and maximum life spans of MCAT mice were extended relative to those of wild-type littermates. We now report that MCAT expression is associated with reduced malignant [tumor] burden, reduced cardiac lesions, and a trend toward reduced systemic inflammation ... Combined disease burden and comorbidity are also reduced, and MCAT expression is not associated with any detrimental clinical effects. The results suggest that oxidative damage is involved in aging of [mice] via modulation of a subset of age-associated lesions. Antioxidant interventions targeting mitochondria may therefore be a viable strategy for prevention or postponement of some age-associated diseases."

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