Category Archives: Human Longevity

Public release date: 15-Oct-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kim Newman sciencenews@einstein.yu.edu 718-430-3101 Albert Einstein College of Medicine

October 15, 2012 (BRONX, NY) Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has received a $3 million grant from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research to establish the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research. The grant will fund research to translate recent laboratory and animal discoveries into therapies to slow human aging.

Aging contributes to many of the debilitating and costly diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes that burden the United States and many other countries. This complex but universal condition causes individual cells and the body as a whole to decline in function. Finding the mechanisms that underlie the aging process may lead to treatments that slow aging, prevent or limit common diseases, and allow people to live healthier, longer lives.

"Unless we find protective mechanisms to delay aging, we will not make progress against age-related diseases," said Nir Barzilai, M.D., co-director of the new center as well as director of the Institute for Aging Research, the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair in Aging Research, and professor of medicine and of genetics at Einstein. "With this valuable grant from the Paul F. Glenn Foundation, we hope to make significant advances toward understanding the aging process and improving human health."

"The generosity of Paul F. Glenn and his foundation is a welcome shot in the arm for aging research in the United States, which is chronically underfunded," said Jan Vijg, Ph.D., co-director of the new center, the Lola and Saul Kramer Chair in Molecular Genetics, and professor and chair of genetics and professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at Einstein. "This grant will help Einstein to maintain its position as one of the world's leaders in this rapidly growing field."

"Paul F. Glenn has been a visionary in aging research for more than 30 years," said Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the new center, the Robert and Rene Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases, and professor of developmental and molecular biology, of anatomy and structural biology and of medicine at Einstein. "Some of us got to know him when we were still graduate students and he came to scientific conferences to see the data as it was being developed. Paul's personal approach to science has made a big difference to many of us in the field of aging research and has contributed to the career development of many young investigators."

The funding, in the form of pilot and feasibility study grants, is targeted to several specific research projects: uncovering the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that protect humans against aging and age-related diseases, testing the effectiveness of the first-generation pro-longevity therapies, and developing novel preventive and therapeutic interventions against cellular aging in humans.

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Drs. Barzilai and Cuervo are also co-directors of Einstein's Institute for Aging Research and, together with Dr. Vijg, of the Nathan Shock Center for the Basic Biology of Aging. Both centers are funded by the National Aging Institute, part of the National Institutes for Health.

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Einstein establishes the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research

Some books are so much a part of our childhood experience that when we hear their titles we can almost smell the pages of the book itself, remember where we were when we first opened it, and conjure up entire scenes and memories of reading it for the first or many times thereafter. Charlotte's Web is one of those books. Today, the most famous book by the masterful E.B. White has turned 60. It is no worse for wear in terms of readability and resonance, even amid a world of Y.A. dystopias, fantasies, and futuristic plots and themes. The simple tale of a pig, a girl, and a spider, beginning with a life saved (Wilbur's, by the girl, Fern, and later by Charlotte the spider) and ending with a deathbut then new lifeis threaded through with the personal conflicts, conversations, and camaraderie of the various barnyard creatures involved. It's one for the ages.

We all know the plot, right? This should come as a spoiler to no one:

Wilbur, a tiny piglet, the runt of the litter, is saved by 8-year-old Fern Arable, who begs her dad to let her keep him as a pet. He does, but after Wilbur is old enough, nursed to health by a bottle, the pig is sent to live on Fern's Uncle Homer's farm. Fern gets older and stops visiting so often, and poor Wilbur gets lonely, until he meets a new friend: Charlotte the spider. When it becomes clear (with the help of an old sheep on the farm) that Wilbur is being fattened up because he's intended as a holiday meal, wise Charlotte promises to save him and begins to spin webs that will convince the humans that Wilbur is a pig beyond the pale. Wilbur becomes famousin another time, Wilbur would have had a reality showleft to live out his years in peace on the farm, but happily ever after has complications.

As an added perk for the semantic-minded, Charlotte is kind of a word-nerd: Upon her webs, illustrated in the book by Garth Williams, she writes "some pig," "terrific," "radiant," and "humble." As Eudora Welty wrote in her 1952 New York Times review of the book, of the character of the spider, "When her friends wake up in the morning she says 'Salutations!'in spite of sometimes having been up all night herself, working." It's worth noting that Charlotte is a great female charactersmart, brave, loyal, and doing what she needs to do, even if she's spider rather than human; Fern, also, is an empowered, courageous girl, even at just 8 years old.

Welty added, "As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done. What it all provesin the words of the minister in the story which he hands down to his congregation after Charlotte writes 'Some Pig' in her webis 'that human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders.'''

Sixty years later, White's children's classic is one of the most-read books of all time. Brooklyn children's librarian Rita Meade told me, "Charlotte's Webhas been a staple on school reading lists for what seems likeforever, and every timea kidrequests it,I tell them 'Oh, you're going to love this book.'I don't have the heart to tell them how sad it is, of course, but I guess it's something that every kid has to experience for him or herself."

It is, in fact, terribly sad. Of course, that's some of the beauty of it; like other deeply tragic and moving kids' books (A Bridge to Terabithia, for example) readers befriend and learn to love characters right along with the other characters in those books who are doing the sameand then, when those characters are so unfairly wrenched from us, we suffer along with their book-based friends. Of course, death is a part of life, and that's one of the messages of these children's books. But there's redemption in that love and friendship having been there before death, which is one reason we rely on these these books as formative reading material. As Charlotte tells Wilbur, "You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, whats a life, anyway? Were born, we live a little while, we die. A spiders life cant help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyones life can stand a little of that."

In an NPR piece today in honor of the book's 60th, author Michael Sims, who wrote The Story of Charlotte's Web, about White's life and famous novel, reveals that when the writer narrated the audiobook of his work in 1970, he couldn't resist the emotional pull either:

"He, of course, as anyone does doing an audio book, had to do several takes for various things, just to get it right," Sims says. "But every time, he broke down when he got to Charlotte's death. And he would do it, and it would mess up. ... He took 17 takes to get through Charlotte's death without his voice cracking or beginning to cry."

Meade adds, of the book's longevity, "I think it's been around for so long because of the honesty of the characters and the way they convey their feelingseven though most of them aren't human, [we get a whole barnyard of characters, in fact] they feel and expresshuman emotions and that makes these emotionsmore easily relatable to kids. It's a great book forstarting discussionsabout difficult issueswith young readers," she says. "It's just a great book anyway."

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A Pig, a Girl, and a Spider: 'Charlotte's Web' at 60

Humans are living longer than ever, a life-span extension that occurred more rapidly than expected and almost solely from environmental improvements as opposed to genetics, researchers said today (Oct. 15).

Four generations ago, the average Swede had the same probability of dying as a hunter-gatherer, but improvements in our living conditions through medicine, better sanitation and clean drinking water (considered "environmental" changes) accelerated life spans to modern levels in just 100 years, researchers found.

In Japan, 72 has become the new 30, as the likelihood of a 72-year-old modern-day person dying is the same as a 30-year-old hunter-gatherer ancestor who lived 1.3 million years ago. Though the researchers didn't specifically look at the United States, they say the life-span trends are not country-specific and not based in genetics.

Quick jump in life span

The same progress of decreasing average probability of dying at a certain age in hunters-gatherers that took 1.3 million years to achieve was made in 30 years during the 21st century.

"I pictured a more gradual transition from a hunter-gatherer mortality profile to something like we have today, rather than this big jump, most of which occurred in the last four generations, to me that was surprise," lead author Oskar Burger, postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, told LiveScience.

Biologists have lengthened life spans of worms, fruit flies and mice in labs by selectively breeding for old-age survivorship or tweaking their endocrine system, a network of glands that affects every cell in the body. However, the longevity gained in humans over the past four generations is even greater than can be created in labs, researchers concluded. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

Genetics vs. environment

In the new work, Burger and colleagues analyzed previously published mortality data from Sweden, France and Japan, from present-day hunter-gatherers and from wild chimpanzees, the closet living relative to humans.

Humans have lived for an estimated 8,000 generations, but only in the past four have mortalities increased to modern-day levels. Hunter-gatherers today have average life spans on par with wild chimpanzees.

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Human Life Span Took Huge Jump in Past Century

Despite what the fashion magazines tell you, 40 isnt the new 30. Seventy is.

A new study finds that humans are living so much longer today compared with the rest of human history that the probability of dying at 72 is similar to the death odds our ancestors likely faced at 30.

This uptick in longevity is quite recent occurring in the last century and a half which suggests it has little to do with genes, starvation diets or anti-aging miracle drugs. Rather, it is likely due to eliminating environmental dangers faced by Homo sapiens of old, an evolutionary anthropologist and his colleagues argue online October 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sanitation measures that clean up drinking water, regular access to food, plus antibiotics and vaccines seem to go a long way toward fighting off death.

Its striking, says Ronald Lee, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in demographics and aging. We already think of humans as a really long-lived species, says Lee, who wasnt involved in the study. It raises the question of how far we can go.

Evolutionary anthropologist Oskar Burger and his team wanted to study human longevity in an evolutionary context. So they turned to previously gathered data on chimpanzees, hunter-gatherer societies in parts of Africa and South America and numbers from the Human Mortality Database for Japan, Sweden and France.

The data reveal a steady, gradual drop in the probability of dying relatively young that begins just before 1900 for the French and Swedes. But the mortality numbers for hunter-gatherers remain closer to wild chimpanzees than to these westernized societies. However, when the researchers looked at hunter-gatherer groups who received some western medicine and occasional help with food, the mortality in those groups dropped, widening the gap between them and chimps and bumping them up to numbers comparable with pre-1900 Sweden and France.

Its amazing what clean water and a bit of extra food gets you, says Berger, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

A 30-year-old hunter-gatherer has the same probability of death as a Japanese person today who is 72 years old, the study found. At 15, a hunter-gatherer has a 1.3 percent probability of dying in the next year; Swedes hit those odds at age 69.

Surprisingly, the research also suggests that theres room for improvement, and that the upper limit on healthy human living has yet to be reached. Aging theory suggests that the biological machinery should increasingly break down once a person passes the age of reproducing and caring for young (SN: 10/20/12, p. 16). But for some reason, humans seem to have become exceptionally good at dodging that bullet.

And researchers may even be able to extend human lifespans even longer with insights from ongoing research into the cellular switches and genes that extend the lives of roundworms and rodents in the lab.

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Living longer comes easier

Jay Lee, president of Northeastern Junior College, receives a certificate of recognition celebrating the college's longevity in northeast Colorado. NJC has been in Sterling since 1941. (David Martinez/Journal-Advocate) ( Picasa )

Nevertheless, those three companies plus 43 more were honored for at least 60 years of business Thursday afternoon in NJC's Tennant Art Gallery. They received certificates of appreciation from the Eastern Workforce Center, as part of the Department of Labor and Employment's statewide Grown in Colorado initiative.

Though only about two dozen representatives came to accept their certificates,

Jessie Ruiz, director of human resource and public relations at MV Equipment, talks about the benefits his company's five John Deere dealers has brought the region. (David Martinez/Journal-Advocate) ( Picasa )

I think we had a great turnout, she said. It was a great showcase for what the Workforce Center does.

Garcia said the 10-county region's six offices assist business customers in recruitment and retention of employees. On the job-seeker side, they post new openings on their website and offer classes that teach job readiness skills. The older businesses provide a consistent source for northeastern Colorado jobs, which can be a boon in an economy that hangs at about 8 percent unemployment.

Jessie Ruiz, director of human resource and public relations for MV Equipment, said his company provides about 100 jobs over five John Deere locations (Sterling, Holyoke, Wray, Burlington and Yuma). That's a steady pace for a business that started in 1938 with one employee and a garage.

He said MV Equipment, like many of the other 60-plus-year-old businesses, has embraced the community by partnering with two colleges (including NJC), and six Workforce Center offices even sponsoring the day's ceremonies.

We talk about work force, we talk about job market, he said. We've created 10 new positions. An average employee makes about $40,000. That's about $400,000 we can put back into the economy.

Jay Lee, president of NJC, flaunted the college's status as the biggest junior college representative in the state, plus the fact that it employs about 200 people.

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Local businesses honored for their longevity

A GEORGIAN woman who claimed to be 132 years old - making her the worlds oldest human being ever - has died.

Antisa Khvichava claimed to have been born on 8 July 1880, and had a Soviet-era passport and documentation to that effect, but her age was contested and never officially proven.

She lived in the remote village of Sachino, in north-west Georgia, with her 42-year-old grandson and claimed to have retired from her job as a tea and corn picker in 1965 when she was 85.

Mrs Khvichava claimed to be just 10 years younger than Russias first communist leader Vladimir Lenin, and to have been born a year before the death of the celebrated Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

She said she had 12 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, and reportedly attributed her longevity and good health to drinking a small amount of local brandy every day.

Mrs Khvichava, who only spoke in the local language Mingrelian, would already have been 31 when the Titanic sunk in April 1912 and 37 during Russias October Revolution in 1917. She would have been 61 when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War in 1941 and 111 when the Soviet Union formally came to an end in 1991.

Her original birth certificate is said to have been lost during the years of revolutions and civil wars that ravaged Georgia following the fall of the USSR. But local officials, friends, neighbours and descendants have all back up the claim that she was 132 when she died.

Experts have some doubt over the claims however, as all the documents stating her age were created long after Mrs Khvichava's birth. Without documents dating from the 1880s, researchers said her real age is likely to remain a mystery.

The oldest living person at the moment is 116-year-old Besse Cooper from the state of Georgia in the USA. Her birth can be officially proven to have been in August 1896.

The oldest ever verified person was French woman Jeanne Calment, born in February 1875, who lived to 122 years and 164 days before dying in August 1997. She claimed to have met the artist Vincent Van Gogh when she was a young woman.

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Was she really 132? World's 'oldest ever person' dies in remote Georgian village

By David McGrath Schwartz (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012 | 1:30 p.m.

CARSON CITY Gov. Brian Sandoval said he will still attempt to reverse salary cuts and furloughs borne by state employees since 2009, but the state has to weigh costs in health and human services and see where the state's tax collections are.

Sandoval, talking to reporters Tuesday after a Board of Examiner's meeting, said he never promised to restore those cuts, though instructions to agencies included that direction.

"I'm hopeful ... we can restore some of those salary reductions that have occurred historically," he said.

Since 2009, the state's budget has been balanced in large part with reductions to the pay for 17,000 state employees. In 2011, the Legislature and Sandoval instituted a 2.5 percent pay cut and six furlough days a year to save the state about $123 million a year. It also eliminated automatic pay increases for some employees and longevity pay, saving $69 million, according to the state budget office.

Sandoval's chief of staff, Gerald Gardner, told the Nevada Appeal last week that he had directed agencies to build those pay cuts and furloughs back into their budgets. Earlier budget instructions from the governor attempted to restore pay levels.

"I appreciate the hard work and dedication of state employees," Sandoval said Tuesday, pointing to state employees' response to Northern Nevada fires and efforts to reduce the costs of leases.

"It's a consideration to restore those" reductions, he said.

He instructed agencies to prepare "flat" budgets, but include the costs of increased caseloads and federal mandates. He said one area of increase has been health and human services, part of which he blamed on the Affordable Care Act.

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Sandoval says he never promised to restore state workers' pay

London, Oct 8 (IANS) A Georgian woman who claimed to be 132-years-old - making her the world's oldest human being ever - has died, The Independent reported Monday.

Antisa Khvichava claimed to have been born July 8, 1880, and had a Soviet-era passport and documentation to that effect, but her age was contested and never officially proven.

She lived in Sachino village in northwest Georgia with her 42-year-old grandson and claimed to have retired from her job as a tea and corn picker in 1965, when she was 85.

Khvichava claimed to be just 10-years younger than Russia's first communist leader Vladimir Lenin and to have been born a year before the death of celebrated Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

She said she had 12 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren and reportedly attributed her longevity and good health to drinking a small amount of local brandy every day, according to the newspaper.

Her original birth certificate is said to have been lost during the years of revolutions and civil wars that ravaged Georgia following the fall of the USSR.

But local officials, friends, neighbours and descendants have all back up the claim she was 132 when she died, the daily said.

The oldest living person at the moment is 116-year-old Besse Cooper from the state of Georgia in the US. Her birth can be officially proven to have been in August 1896.

The oldest ever verified person was French woman Jeanne Calment, born in February 1875, who lived to 122 years and 164 days before dying in August 1997.

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World's 'oldest person' dies at 132

Possibly the last person on the planet who knew the taste of the air in 1880 has died.

Antisa Khvichava, who claimed to be 132 years old, was enjoying her 47th year of retirement in Sachino, a remote village in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, when she passed away, according to a British newspaper, the Independent. If she was as old as she said, Khvichava would've been the oldest person to ever live.

Though a birth certificate and passport indicate Khvichava was born July 8, 1880, they are replacements of documents she had lost over the years, raising skepticism over her claim.

But science can't rule out her feat absolutely. If there's a maximum possible human age, it hasn't been found yet.

In 1798, the then-oldest verified person died at 103, according to the Gerontology Research Group. In 1997, France's Jeanne Calment, the current verified oldest, died at 122. [Infographic: Global Life Expectancy]

If Kvichava did, indeed, walk the Earth for well over a century, what did she do right?

Based on current science, the answer might be that, other than avoiding obvious physical threats, she didn't do much to earn her longevity.

Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University showed last year that, among a studied population of people older than 95, bad health habits such as smoking, drinking, poor diet and lack of exercise were about as common as in the general population, meaning their longevity seemed to be largely based on genes.

But this does not mean the general population should abandon healthy living and adopt a doctrine of genetic fatalism. Rather, that study and others suggest longevity outliers like Kvichava, a reported daily brandy drinker, have rare genetic protections that transcend unhealthy habits, propelling them into very old age in spite of lifestyle.

For people who aren't prepared to take a gamble that they're genetically predisposed to break 100 (the 2010 Census counted 53,364 centenarians in the United States), the famously abstemious and healthy-living Seventh-Day Adventists seem to hint at a practical regimen for increasing lifespan.

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How Did Woman Live to 132?

Jeanne Calment is the French woman who lived the longest authenticated human life 122 years and 164 days.

While it seems that so much of longevity is tied to the genetic hand we are dealt at birth, we certainly can adopt and pursue lifestyles that improve our chances for living longer, or, for that matter, not spending as much time on earth as we could have had we taken a healthier route.

Much is made of Ms. Calments lifestyle and diet. Incredibly, she smoked until she was about 110 (science suggests Ms. Calment had a rare innate biological protection from the deleterious effects of the bad habit). Yet, she was also riding a bike until she was a 100 and she continued to walk until a few months short of her 115th birthday, when she broke her femur.

Ms. Calment, who died in 1997, said she did not get stressed about too much. Her regular diet included olive oil, port wine and get ready up to two pounds of chocolate a week, only giving up the sweet when she had reached the age of 119.

Could chocolate have had something to do with that amazing life span?

Perhaps, yes, maybe a little bit. And chocolate is a sweeter excuse the pun alternative to other life extending therapies.

We are finding out more almost every day about the health benefits of chocolate and of cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate.

What is it in chocolate that is good for us?

Chocolate especially dark chocolate is rich in antioxidants called flavonoids. Clinical research has shown that flavonoids can reduce and prevent cardiovascular damage and lower blood pressure.

Science also supports that dark chocolate flavonoids have a positive effect on blood cholesterol pushing the bad form down, and raising the good form.

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Over The Counter: Chocolate and caffeine - good news on the healthfront