Search results for "Longevity"
showing 10 items of 378 documents
Cellular immune activation in Sardinian middle-aged, older adults and centenarians
2017
In addition to viral infections, malignant disorders, autoimmune diseases, and allograft rejection episodes, neopterin increases in older people where it is found to be predictive of overall mortality. Thus, the serum concentrations of this biomarker of systemic immune and inflammation activation, were measured in a small cohort of Sardinian middle-aged, older adults and centenarians. There was a significant positive correlation between neopterin concentrations and age with the subjects in the 95-year-old group with the highest values. Notably, the group of centenarians had neopterin values comparable to those of 80- and 90-year-old groups, and significantly lower than that of 95-year-old g…
Accelerated Aging and Age-Related Diseases (CVD and Neurological) due to Air Pollution and Traffic Noise Exposure
2021
The World Health Organization estimates that only approximately 25% of diversity in longevity is explained by genetic factors, while the other 75% is largely determined by interactions with the physical and social environments. Indeed, aging is a multifactorial process that is influenced by a range of environmental, sociodemographic, and biopsychosocial factors, all of which might act in concert to determine the process of aging. The global average life expectancy increased fundamentally over the past century, toward an aging population, correlating with the development and onset of age-related diseases, mainly from cardiovascular and neurological nature. Therefore, the identification of de…
Inbreeding removes sex differences in lifespan in a population of Drosophila melanogaster
2016
Sex differences in ageing rates and lifespan are common in nature, and an enduring puzzle for evolutionary biology. One possibility is that sex-specific mortality rates may result from recessive deleterious alleles in ‘unguarded’ heterogametic X or Z sex chromosomes (the unguarded X hypothesis). Empirical evidence for this is, however, limited. Here, we test a fundamental prediction of the unguarded X hypothesis in Drosophila melanogaster, namely that inbreeding shortens lifespan more in females (the homogametic sex in Drosophila) than in males. To test for additional sex-specific social effects, we studied the lifespan of males and females kept in isolation, in related same-sex groups, and…
A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan
2015
SummaryProlonged fasting (PF) promotes stress resistance, but its effects on longevity are poorly understood. We show that alternating PF and nutrient-rich medium extended yeast lifespan independently of established pro-longevity genes. In mice, 4 days of a diet that mimics fasting (FMD), developed to minimize the burden of PF, decreased the size of multiple organs/systems, an effect followed upon re-feeding by an elevated number of progenitor and stem cells and regeneration. Bi-monthly FMD cycles started at middle age extended longevity, lowered visceral fat, reduced cancer incidence and skin lesions, rejuvenated the immune system, and retarded bone mineral density loss. In old mice, FMD c…
Human longevity within an evolutionary perspective: The peculiar paradigm of a postreproductive genetics
2008
The data we collected on the genetics of human longevity, mostly resulting from studies on centenarians, indicate that: (1) centenarians and long-living sib-pairs are a good choice for the study of human longevity, because they represent an extreme phenotype, i.e., the survival tail of the population who escaped neonatal mortality, pre-antibiotic era illnesses, and fatal outcomes of age-related complex diseases. (2) The model of centenarians is not simply an additional model with respect to well-studied organisms, and the study of humans has revealed characteristics of ageing and longevity (geographical and sex differences, role of antigenic load and inflammation, role of mtDNA variants) wh…
Sicilian centenarian offspring are more resistant to immune ageing
2018
Background: Immunosenescence constitutes a major indirect cause of morbidity and mortality in the elderly. Previous analysis of immune signatures in a cohort of centenarian offspring showed an intermediate immunophenotype between age-matched and younger controls. Aims: To confirm and extend the previous studies performing further phenotypical analysis in centenarian offspring and controls. Methods: Analysis of Treg cells, γδ T cells, mucosal-associated invariant T cells, and senescent immune T cells was performed in centenarian offspring and controls. Results: We report significant differences between elderly and centenarian offspring in most of the studied subsets, showing that centenarian…
Parental effects on offspring longevity--evidence from 17th to 19th century reproductive histories.
2004
Family studies provide support for a modest genetic influence on offspring life span, although the magnitude of these correlations is small.The study aimed to clarify the relative contributions of parental age at birth and overall parental longevity on offspring lifespan, and to identify the biological and cultural mechanisms.Information was derived from two village genealogies (1650-1927) encompassing 9979 births (5315 males, 4664 females). Data selection was guided by the inclusion of information about parental age at birth and lifespan, offspring lifespan and cohort-specific life expectancy.Parental age at reproduction displayed a negative association with offspring survivability, which …
Longitudinal assessment of health-span and pre-death morbidity in wild type
2018
The increase in human life expectancy is accompanied by age-related cognitive and motor disability, thus raising the demand for strategies toward healthy aging. This requires understanding the biology of normal aging and late-life functional phenotypes. Genetic model organisms, such as Drosophila melanogaster, can help identifying evolutionary conserved mechanisms underlying aging. Longitudinal assessment of motor performance of more than 1000 individual flies revealed age-related motor performance decline and specific late-life motor disabilities. This allows defining heath- and ill-span and scoring late-life quality of individual flies. As in mammals, including humans, onset, duration, se…
HLA, aging, and longevity: a critical reappraisal.
2000
Despite a large number of studies, available data do not allow at present to reach definitive and clear conclusions on role of HLA on longevity, owing to major methodological problems, such as serological and molecular typing of different loci, insufficient sample sizes, different inclusion criteria and age cut-off, inappropriate mixing of data referred to people from 58 to over 100 years of age, inappropriate control matching, and neglected consideration of sex-related effects and the different genetic make-up of studied populations. However, within this confused scenario, some data emerge. First, two studies that do not fit the biases above discussed show that some HLA alleles are associa…
Association between the HLA-DR alleles and longevity: a study in Sardinian population
2003
Human longevity may be correlated with optimal functioning of the immune system, suggesting that genetic determinants of longevity also resides in those polymorphisms for the immune system genes that regulate immune responses as histocompatibility (HLA) antigens. However, conflicting results have been obtained. Some well planned and designed association studies performed in Caucasians suggest 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 diseases, respectively, via peptide presentation or via antigen non-specific control of immune response. Association studies are subjected to a number of …