All posts tagged: lifespan

Better fitness in your 40s and 50s linked to a longer, healthier life

Better fitness in your 40s and 50s linked to a longer, healthier life

Published by Jenni Sidey

Researchers have found that cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) during midlife provides a greater benefit than just living longer. It also means that the onset of serious illnesses is delayed. This is one of the main points of a new study published in JACC, the American College of Cardiology’s flagship journal. The study found that those who had higher levels of CRF during middle age not only lived longer, but also experienced major chronic diseases later in life and spent more years living in good health. When looking at these results, it is important to separate living longer from living longer without any major chronic disease, such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, etc. Cardiorespiratory fitness, or CRF, refers to how efficiently your heart and lungs supply oxygen for physical activities. For many years, it has been established that individuals with higher levels of CRF have a lower risk of dying from heart disease or other illnesses that might result in an early death. Now we see that CRF in midlife is also related to what …

Daily movement and sleep patterns can predict lifespan with striking accuracy

Daily movement and sleep patterns can predict lifespan with striking accuracy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some fish, it turns out, are morning people. They swim hard during daylight, sleep mostly at night, and tend to live longer. Others drift into daytime napping early in life, move less vigorously, and die sooner. The remarkable thing is that this divergence shows up well before middle age, in animals that are genetically similar and raised under identical conditions. A study published in Science has mapped the full arc of aging in individual vertebrates for the first time, tracking dozens of small fish continuously from adolescence to natural death and finding that behavior, observed early enough, can predict how much time an animal has left. The research was led by postdoctoral scholars Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, working in collaboration between the labs of geneticist Anne Brunet and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth. It was supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience. Ravi Nath (left) and Claire Bedbrook with an aging African killifish. (CREDIT: Stanford University / Andrew Brodhead) A Fish Built for This Question Most aging studies work …

How the sometimes-weird world of lifespan extension is gaining influence

How the sometimes-weird world of lifespan extension is gaining influence

Published by skeptic

My reporting has also made me realize that the current interest in longevity reaches beyond social media influencers and wellness centers. Longevity clinics are growing in number, and there’s been a glut of documentaries about living longer or even forever. At the same time, powerful people who influence state laws, giant federal funding budgets, and even national health policy are prioritizing the search for treatments that slow or reverse aging. The longevity community was thrilled when longtime supporter Jim O’Neill was made deputy secretary of health and human services last year. Other members of Trump’s administration, including Oz, have spoken about longevity too. “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history,” Gries told me. I recently spoke to Alicia Jackson, the new director of ARPA-H. The agency, established in 2022 under Joe Biden’s presidency, funds “breakthrough” biomedical research. And it appears to have a new focus on longevity. Jackson previously founded and led Evernow, a company focused on “health and longevity for every woman.” “There’s a lot of interesting technologies, but they all kind …

Genes play a big part in driving lifespan, scientists find | Science, Climate & Tech News

Genes play a big part in driving lifespan, scientists find | Science, Climate & Tech News

Published by skeptic

The genes you inherit play a bigger role in determining your lifespan than previously thought, according to a new study. Previous studies have concluded genetics plays a 6% to 33% role in how long a person lives – but new research published in the journal, Science, has boosted that figure to as high as 55%. Ben Shenhar, lead author of the study, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said: “Lifespan is undoubtedly shaped by many factors including lifestyle, genes and, importantly, randomness – take for example genetically identical organisms raised in similar environments that die ​at different times. “In our work, we tried to give a handle on the amount of variance between different people that can be ‍attributed to genetics. “Our study tried to partition the longevity factors into genetics and ‘everything else’. The ‘everything else’ is around 50% of the pile.” Researchers looked at historical data from human twin studies and found factors such as deaths caused by violence, accidents and infectious diseases had not been taken into account. The cause …

Scientists identify five distinct phases of brain structure across the human lifespan

Scientists identify five distinct phases of brain structure across the human lifespan

Published by José Betancourt

New research indicates that the structural organization of the human brain does not develop in a continuous, linear fashion but rather progresses through five distinct phases separated by specific turning points. By analyzing brain scans from thousands of individuals ranging from infants to ninety-year-olds, scientists identified significant shifts in neural architecture occurring around ages nine, 32, 66, and 83. These findings, published in Nature Communications, provide a new framework for understanding how the brain reorganizes itself throughout the human lifespan and suggests that structural adolescence may extend well into the third decade of life. Previous research has established that brain structure and function evolve as people age. However, many of these studies focused on specific developmental windows, such as early childhood or old age, rather than the entire life course. When studies did examine broader age ranges, they often relied on models that assumed smooth, gradual trajectories, such as a simple peak in adulthood followed by a steady decline. The authors of the new study argued that these approaches might miss complex, non-linear shifts in …