From the Independent: “It is one of medicine’s mysteries: what has caused Britain’s plummeting rate of heart disease over the last decade? Deaths from heart attacks have halved since 2002 and no one is quite sure why. Similar changes have occurred in countries around the world but the death rate in England, especially, has fallen further and faster than almost anywhere. … The researchers looked at 840,000 men and women in England who had suffered a total of 861,000 heart attacks between 2002 and 2010. Overall, the death rates fell by 50 per cent in men and 53 per cent…

Source:Falling Heart Disease Rates

Here is an open access PDF format mini-review on what is known of growth hormone and aging - that less of it is generally better: “A recent report of virtually complete protection from diabetes and cancer in a population of people with hereditary dwarfism revived interest in elucidating the relationships between growth, adult body size, age-related disease and longevity. In many species, smaller individuals outlive those that are larger and a similar relationship was shown in studies of various human populations. Adult body size is strongly dependent on the actions of growth hormone (GH) and the absence of GH or…

Source:On Growth Hormone and "Smaller is Better"

Science recently hosted a live chat event with researchers Aubrey de Grey and S. Jay Olshansky, public figures who have debated their views on longevity science a number of times over the last seven years or so. The logs and viewer comments from the event remain available for those interested in viewing the discussion: Live Chat: The Science of Antiaging Jennifer Couzin-Frankel: And here’s a question from Roy: Does the paper titled “Clearance of p16 positive senescent cells delays ageing-associate disorder” published in Nature January, 2011, prove the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS’s) validity, i.e. extend lifespan by remediating…

Source:An Online Chat With Aubrey de Grey and S. Jay Olshansky

This year’s Buck Symposium, an event hosted by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, will be held on March 1st. The Institute is very much a part of the mainstream of biogerontology, wherein frank talk of extending human life span is rare, and the public relations tends to focus on age-related diseases and length of healthy life within the current human life span: At the Buck Institute, world-class scientists work in a uniquely collaborative environment to understand how normal aging contributes to the development of conditions specifically associated with getting older such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cancer, stroke,…

Source:2012 Buck Symposium, March 1st at the Buck Institute

The course of our future lives, our health and longevity, is swayed by a population of timid mice - but malicious mice, ever ready to use state force to punish and hold back anyone they see as being insufficiently timid. These are people who support the ball and chain of centralized regulation of medical research, people who fear all change, people who fear everything they don’t understand, and people who rush to prevent anyone else from enjoying the freedom to undertake personal risk in the course of advancing progress. This describes the vocal mainstream of Western culture: risk-averse, ignorant, and…

Source:A Culture of Controlling, Malicious Timidity

Here is another example of work on creating patient-specific cells to order, one of the necessary building block technologies needed for an industry that constructs organs and other larger masses of tissue in the body: researchers have “discovered a method of generating different types of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) - the cells which make up the walls of blood vessels - using cells from patients’ skin. … Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. These deaths are mainly caused by the hardening and subsequent blockage of blood vessels due to the accumulation of fatty materials,…

Source:Creating Smooth Muscle Cells from Skin Cells

From the New York Times: “A treatment for eye diseases that is derived from human embryonic stem cells might have improved the vision of two patients. The report, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first to describe the effect on patients of a therapy involving human embryonic stem cells. … The results [come] from the second clinical trial involving the stem cells, using a therapy developed by Advanced Cell Technology to treat macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness. … Both patients, who were legally blind, said in interviews that they had gains in eyesight that…

Source:Early Trials of Embryonic Stem Cells to Treat Degenerative Blindness

NPR interviews Paolo Macchiarini, who leads the group working on transplanted tissue engineered tracheas: “How was the scaffold for the synthetic trachea built? Well, basically, by the same fibers that everybody of us has, nanofibers; very, very small fibers that are composed and native to the human trachea. So when we wanted to transplant this organ, we thought what is best. And the best would be to just replicate what human nature has done. And this is the reason why we use these very thin fibers. … So I imagine you could try to do this with other organs in…

Source:An Interview With Paolo Macchiarini

Exercise extends healthy life in laboratory animals, but not maximum life span as is the case for calorie restriction. In longer lived species such as our own, that difference may be slight: present evidence suggests exercise and calorie restriction to have broadly similar - though very different in detail - effects on life expectancy. The end results are probably in the same ballpark, and quite possibly achieved through an overlapping set of mechanisms. That said, while exercise is certainly good for you, I’ve yet to see a study on exercise that reproduces similar eye-opening changes in underlying biomarkers of health…

Source:Testing Autophagy as a Mechanism of Longevity for Exercise

The ape inside is troubled when it learns that someone else has more than you do - which is something that you should strive to ignore if you like living in a peaceful society. The lesson to take away from this article and research is that the generally better choices made by the wealthy when it comes to health are equally available to near everyone - the effects of diet and exercise outweigh most other factors in the wealthier nations, assuming that you didn’t suffer rare bad luck in your genetic legacy. “Wealthy people possess more than just spending power….

Source:Better Choices Lead to Greater Longevity