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Showing posts with label Ageing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ageing. Show all posts

Saturday, December 14, 2013

When Life Goes On, and On ...

The debate over a longer lifespan confronts many issued including medical costs, insurance coverage and quality of life. Workers' Compensation programs pay for lifetime care also in most instances. Today's post is shared from the NYTimes.org  .
To the Editor:
Re “On Dying After Your Time,” by Daniel Callahan (Sunday Review, Dec. 1): Mainstream aging research neither promises radical immortality nor seeks to keep old people sick longer. Aging is a driving factor in the most prevalent and costly chronic diseases. Research indicates that interventions slowing aging delay the onset of these diseases. Therefore, they extend not only life span but also health span, the disease-free and functional period of life.
Fundamentally, the goals of aging research are not dissimilar from efforts to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s or other chronic diseases in that they both seek to improve quality of life in the elderly. The difference is that interventions in aging may prevent not just one but a range of debilitating diseases simultaneously.
The reality is that the world is rapidly getting older. With baby boomers leaving the work force, there won’t be enough workers to pay the ever-increasing Medicare costs of the retired. Extending health span will lower Medicare costs and allow aging people to stay engaged.
Interventions that slow human aging will provide a powerful modality of preventive medicine: improving quality of life by keeping people...
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Monday, November 25, 2013

Accelerated aging found in long-term unemployed men

Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from www.medicalnewstoday.com

Men who are unemployed for more than two years show signs of faster ageing in their DNA, a new study has found.
Researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Oulu, Finland studied DNA samples from 5,620 men and women born in Finland in 1966.
They measured structures called telomeres, which lie at the ends of chromosomes and protect the genetic code from being degraded. Telomeres become shorter over a person's lifetime, and their length is considered a marker for biological ageing. Short telomeres are linked to higher risk of age-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The researchers looked at telomere length in blood cells from samples collected in 1997, when the participants were all 31 years old. The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that men who had been unemployed for more than two of the preceding three years were more than twice as likely to have short telomeres compared to men who were continuously employed,.
The analysis accounted for other social, biological and behavioural factors that could have affected the result, helping to rule out the possibility that short telomeres were linked to medical conditions that prevented participants from working.
This trend was not seen in women, which may be because fewer women than men in the study were unemployed for long periods in their 30s. Whether long-term unemployment is more harmful for men than women later in life needs to be addressed in future studies.
The Imperial team...
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