Search results for "Psychological"

Centenarians: An excellent example of resilience for successful ageing.

2020

Centenarians are remarkable not only because of their prolonged life, but also because they compress morbidity until the very last moments of their lives, thus being proposed as a model of successful, extraordinary ageing. From the medical viewpoint, centenarians do not escape the physiological decline or the age-related diseases or syndromes (i.e. frailty), but the rate of such processes is slow enough to be counterbalanced by their increased intrinsic capacity to respond to minor stresses of daily life (i.e. resilience). These new concepts are reviewed in this paper. Allostatic stresses lead to a chronic low-grade inflammation that has led to the proposal of the "inflammaging" theory of a…

Biology of frailty: Modulation of ageing genes and its importance to prevent age-associated loss of function

2016

Frailty is associated with loss of functional reserve as well as with the prediction of adverse events in the old population. The traditional criteria of frailty are based on five physical determinations described in the Cardiovascular Health Study. We propose that biological and genetic markers of frailty should be used to increase the predictive capacity of the established clinical indeces. In recent times, research for biological markers of frailty has gained impetus. Finding a biological markers with diagnostic and prognostic capacity would be a major milestone to identify frailty risk, and also pre-frailty status. In the first section of the manuscript, we review the available biomarke…

The free radical theory of frailty: Mechanisms and opportunities for interventions to promote successful aging

2019

The free radical theory of ageing has provided a framework of research into ageing based on Harman's idea that ageing was caused by damage produced by free radicals. However, several experiments have cast doubts on the general validity of the theory. The postulation of the free radical theory of frailty came from two basic facts: first that radicals not only act as damaging molecules, but also as signals to control cell function and second that on many occasions oxidative damage does not correlate with chronological but rather with unsuccessful ageing. Frailty is a geriatric concept by which an older person shows a lack of the feeling of wellbeing, unintentional weight loss, a relatively lo…

Determinants of diet and physical Activity (DEDIPAC): a summary of findings

2017

The establishment of the Determinants of Diet and Physical Activity (DEDIPAC) Knowledge Hub, 2013 – 2016, was the first action taken by the ‘ Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life ’ European Joint Programming Initiative. DEDIPAC aimed to provide better insight into the determinants of diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviour across the life course, i.e. insight into the causes of the causes of important, non-commu nicable diseases across Europe and beyond. DEDIPAC was launched in late 2013, and delivered its final report in late 2016. In this paper we give an overview of what was achieved in terms of furthering measurement and monitoring, providing overviews of the state-of-the-art in the …

Early food for future health: a randomized controlled trial evaluating the effect of an eHealth intervention aiming to promote healthy food habits fr…

2017

Childhood overweight and obesity is a global public health challenge. Primary prevention initiatives targeting parents have been called for to encourage a positive feeding environment and healthy eating habits that may lay a good foundation for future health. At the same time, there is a need for interventions which combine accessibility and scalability with cost effectiveness. Today’s parents are extensive Internet-users, but only a few randomized controlled trials have investigated the use of Internet to promote healthy eating habits in early childhood. In Early Food for Future Health we have developed and will evaluate an Internet-based tool for parents of children between 6 and 12 month…

A cluster randomized web-based intervention trial to reduce food neophobia and promote healthy diets among one-year-old children in kindergarten: stu…

2018

A child’s first years of life are crucial for cognitive development and future health. Studies show that a varied diet with a high intake of vegetables is positive for both weight and cognitive development. The present low intake of vegetables in children’s diets is therefore a concern. Food neophobia can be a barrier for vegetable intake in children. Our hypothesis is that interventions that can increase children’s intake of vegetables should be introduced early in life to overcome children’s neophobia. This study aims to develop, measure and compare the effect of two different interventions among one-year-old children in kindergartens to reduce food neophobia and promote healthy diets. Th…

Sarcopenia, frailty and their prevention by exercise.

2019

Sarcopenia is a major component of the frailty syndrome, both being considered as strong predictors of morbidity, disability, and death in older people. In this review, we explore the definitions of sarcopenia and frailty and summarize the current knowledge on their relationship with oxidative stress and the possible therapeutic interventions to prevent or treat them, including exercise-based interventions and multimodal strategies. We highlight the relevance of the impairment of the nervous system and of the anabolic response (protein synthesis) in muscle aging leading to frailty and sarcopenia. We also discuss the importance of malnutrition and physical inactivity in these geriatric syndr…

2020

Aging is the major risk factor for the development of chronic diseases. After decades of research focused on extending lifespan, current efforts seek primarily to promote healthy aging. Recent advances suggest that biological processes linked to aging are more reliable than chronological age to account for an individual’s functional status, i.e. frail or robust. It is becoming increasingly apparent that biological aging may be detectable as a progressive loss of resilience much earlier than the appearance of clinical signs of frailty. In this context, the INSPIRE program was built to identify the mechanisms of accelerated aging and the early biological signs predicting frailty and pathologi…

A New Frailty Score for Experimental Animals Based on the Clinical Phenotype: Inactivity as a Model of Frailty.

2016

The development of animal models to study human frailty is important to test interventions to be translated to the clinical practice. The aim of this work was to develop a score for frailty in experimental animals based in the human frailty phenotype. We also tested the effect of physical inactivity in the development of frailty as determined by our score. Male C57Bl/6J mice, individually caged, were randomly assigned to one of two groups: sedentary (inactive) or spontaneous wheel-runners. We compared the sedentary versus the active lifestyle in terms of frailty by evaluating the clinical criteria used in humans: unintentional weight loss; poor endurance (running time); slowness (running sp…

Role of nitric oxide pathway in the conditioned rewarding effects of MDMA in mice.

2017

It is estimated that 2.1 million young adults used MDMA/Ecstasy in the last year in Europe. Vulnerable subjects can develop dependence after MDMA abuse but currently there does not exist an effective treatment for this disorder. The nitric oxide (NO) pathway seems to have an important role on the rewarding effects of different drugs and has been proposed as a new pharmacological treatment for psychostimulant addiction. In the present study, we intend to evaluate whether the blockade of the NO synthesis (NOS) interferes with the rewarding effects of MDMA in the conditioned preference place (CPP) paradigm in young adult male mice. Our results indicated that mice treated with 7-nitroindazole (…