Search results for " Successful Ageing"
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Centenarian Offspring as a Model of Successful Ageing
2019
The rapid increase in global average life expectancy, observed during the last years, due to improvements in sanitation and medical care, pushes the scientific community to understand the basis of the ageing process. In particular, in order to improve the life quality of elderly people, current ageing research is focused on the identification of biological mechanisms involved in successful ageing, a complex process influenced by several factors, including genetic, environment, and lifestyle. Centenarians, i.e., subjects who have reached ten or more decades of life, escaping the common age-related diseases, are the leading exponent of successful ageing. However, the rarity of such exponents,…
HLA and KIR Frequencies in Sicilian Centenarians
2010
Several studies suggest that human longevity appears to be linked inextricably with optimal functioning of the immune system, suggesting that specific genetic determinants may reside in loci that regulate the immune response, as human leukocyte antigen (HLA) and killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor (KIR) genes. It has been suggested that longevity is associated with positive selection of alleles (i.e., HLA-DR11) or haplotypes (i.e., HLA-B8,DR3) that confer resistance to infectious disease(s). On the other hand, the cytolytic activity of natural killer (NK) cells is controlled by activating and inhibitory cell-surface receptors, including KIR. The genetic diversity of the KIR loci with r…