BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: age

Can your bacteria reveal your age?

There are billions of bacteria all in, around, and all over you. They prevent diseases, regulate digestion, and everything in between. Researcher Alex Zhavoronkov and his colleagues at InSilico Medicine in Maryland c study and examine whether their predictions that “microbiomes are aging clocks” were true.

To start their study, Alex and his team gathered 3600 samples of gut bacteria from 1165 healthy individuals from around the world, ranging from three age samples. A third of the participants were aged 20 to 39, another third were aged 40 to 59, and the last third were from people aged 60 to 90. They then used machine learning. This means they trained a computer program on “95 different species of bacteria from 90% of the samples, along with the ages of the people they had come from. Then, they asked the algorithm to predict the ages of the people who provided the remaining 10%”. Their program ended up being successful in that 39 bacteria of the 95 were successful in predicting someone’s age within four years.

When researching the certain biomes, Eubacterium hallii-which is important for intestines and metabolisms-became more abundant with age. They also noticed bacteria like Bacteroides vulgatus decreased with age. Alex and his team predict that the different bacteria found may help in detecting peoples’ age.

If validated, the “microbiome aging clock” they created can have many positive effects. It could be used to compare healthy people with those who have diseases. It can test how fast someone is aging and test if any antibiotics, probiotics, diet, or alcohol affect aging. It could help test new treatments or medicine and see if it would have any effect on the aging process. However, challenges may arise. One may include distinguishing whether the different microbes come from age or come from “markedly different populations”. Researcher Robin Knight states, “ it’s also not known whether changes in the microbiome cause people to age more rapidly, or whether the changes are simply a side effect of aging”. It is not yet guaranteed how the aging-clock machine will turn out but if it ends up being successful, many would consider for it to be life-changing.  

90 and Counting…

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Woman#/media/File:Tribes_woman_with_ear_piercing.jpg

Life expectancy is continuously rising, and is expected to rise immensely in various countries around the world. The U.S however, is not increasing as drastically.

A recent study was done to predict the average life expectancy for 35 countries in the year 2030. The greatest increases were seen in females born in South Korea and males born in Hungary. The smallest increases were people born in Macedonia.

South Korean females are expected to live 6.6 years longer than they would have if they were born in 2010. Their life expectancy is 90.8 years old. WOW!

France had the second highest life expectancy for females, with 88.6 years.

Japan came in third with a predicted life expectancy of 88.4 years, not too far behind France.

The reason this news is so shocking is because scientists once believed that it would be impossible to have a life expectancy exceed 90 years, but South Korea has surpassed it. This barrier will be broken.

Professor Magid Ezzati said, “I don’t believe we’re anywhere near the upper limit of expectancy – if there even is one”.

For men, the greatest increase was in Hungary, with an estimated increase of 7.5 years more than 2010. The life expectancy is 78.2 years for boys born in 2030.

Like the females, South Korean males had the highest predicted life expectancy for 2030, with a whopping 84.1 years. Australia and Switzerland were not far behind with life expectancies of 84 years old.

The United States did not increase much. For women it was expected to increase by 2.1 years and for men it was expected to increase by 3 years. This would mean 83.3 years for women and 79.5 for men.

Researchers in the study noted that life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is already lower than most other high-income countries and that it is projected to fall further behind. Some reasons for this set back are that the U.S. has the highest homicide rates, highest death rates for women and children, and the highest average BMI of any high-income country. It is also the only country out of the 35 in the study that does not provide universal health care, so many people have unmet health care needs due to cost.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/57957-life-expectancy-increasing-2030.html

Additional Information:

https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/publication/global-health-and-aging/living-longer

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2016/12/life_expectancy_is_still_increasing.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11348561/Average-life-expectancy-heading-for-100.html

 

Number of strokes increased in children!

Sean Maloney stroke brainscan

Intel Free Press Image Link

Statistics 

According to new studies, strokes have been affecting younger generations more than ever. The average age for people having a first stroke has dropped from  71.1 in 2000 to 69.3 in 2012.What’s interesting is that in general, the number of strokes in the U.S. has actually gone down over the last few decades, according to Chengwei Li, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. However, Li’s study, shows that the rate of strokes in people under the age of 65 have not gone down, and that the rate of strokes in people under the age of 55 has actually increased.

Treatment

According to a study on WebMD, it is in some ways easier to treat the younger patients affected. People who get to the hospital within 4 and a half hours of their episode, or attack, can receive a drug that breaks up the clot in the brain and restores the blood flow. However, studies have shown that this treatment is more likely to benefit younger patients opposed to elder patients. Although this may be the case, young adults and females in particular, are often not eligible for the treatment because they ignore early symptoms or wait until the symptoms get severe, before they seek help.

As stated in an article from Live Science  and a journal from NCBI, the increase in stroke incidents at younger ages has great significance because strokes in younger patients carry out for a greater lifetime burden of disability.

While the total number of strokes in the U.S. has decreased, the number and severity of strokes in younger generations has increased. As a result, researchers, doctors, and medical staff continue to work together in order to seek ways to treat the newer generation of stroke patients.

Brand New INSANE Trick To Maintain HUGE TELOMERES!!!

Do YOU want to learn the secret to having BIG, LONG telomeres?

OF COURSE YOU DO!

Do you know what Telomeres are?

Umm….

you might not know what they are, but I’m pretty sure you’re gonna want long ones,

and a few scientists lead by Eli Puterman, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, just made a huge breakthrough regarding telomeres.

let me explain.

New research done on Data collected in University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement study and reported on by TheScientist, has found that A.) accumulation of stressful events over the course of a lifetime are associated strongly with shorter telomeres later in life and B.) stressful experiences during childhood have a far greater effect on the shortening of Telomeres in adults than those that occur later in life.

First of all back up. What are Telomeres? And when it comes to Telomeres, does length really matter?

I’ll tell you.

(spoiler alert: length always matters)

Telomeres are caps that go on the end of our DNA. You can think of them like aglets on the end of shoelaces. Telomeres work to protect DNA from becoming damaged, and with that preventing the functionality of DNA from becoming compromised. They’re exactly like that little plastic bit on your shoelaces prevents your lace from becoming frayed, and ruining your shoelace, and your day, and your life.

10085714333_5d4f4d06b2

(the pinks parts are the telomeres)

And a moment of thanks, to the great man who invented aglets.

Harvey Kennnedy,

Thank you.

Back to your telomeres. As we know cells are constantly copying themselves, creating new cells, and every time this happens the telomeres on the end of our DNA become shorter and shorter, before eventually they fail to adequately protect the DNA, causing our cells to lose functionality, and on a larger scale, causing you to age faster. Essentially throughout our lives our telomeres get shorter and shorter, like a candle thats burning lower and lower, it’s a marker for our aging process. A constant reminder of our mortality as humans. A literal ticking clock. We’re all gonna die. Life is meaningless.

You know what’s not meaningless though… BIOLOGY! So while we can never escape the grim reality that our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye on a fleck of dust that’s drifting through an empty abyss of nothingness, why not try to extend that blink of an eye for as long as we can, so that we can read about research findings in the world of biology! speaking of which…

In the study, a group of 4,598 Americans that had an average age of 69 were asked to identify stressful incidents that occurred in both their youth and later adulthood. They then had their telomere lengths measured from cells from saliva samples. In the study, Part of the study’s findings were that “Each additional adverse event during childhood was associated with an 11 percent-increased odd of shorter telomeres”. These results are staggering to be sure, but are not totally out of the blue. One Judith Carroll who researches the links between behavior and health at UCLA said after the study had been completed “The findings are consistent with other reports suggesting that early life is a particularly vulnerable time when the body is rapidly growing and adapting to its surroundings”.

These results were very strong, however some have taken issue with extrapolating stressful incidents to higher mortality. While it is acknowledged that the shortening of telomeres is associated with aging, some wished the study had gone a step further, and examined whether these shorter telomeres really do result in earlier death. As it is said by Iris Hovatta, a scientist at the University of Helsinki (in Finland)(a country I have never been to, so I can’t confirm whether or not it actually exists)(which is neither here nor there)(whether or not ‘there’ really does exist) “this study did not address the effect of stress on health or lifespan and whether individuals with shorter telomeres have an increased mortality” It’s a fair criticism, but as far as we know now, shortening of telomeres causes aging, and this study puts forth strong evidence of an association between stressful events over the course of a lifetime, especially during youth, and shortening of telomeres.

So what does this mean?

if you don’t want to age, avoid stressful events during your youth.

avoid stuff like forgetting when your blog post was due, then staying up until 3 in the morning to finish it.

Then again biology its pretty much all I have to live for.

give and take I guess, we all have to find a balance that works.

 

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