Unlocked mysteries of premature-aging syndrome may provide clues to aging

Some exciting news for a few precious little tikes around the world that deserve it very much and so much more. It might also be exciting for the rest of us as well!

Mysteries of early-aging syndrome unlocked, researchers say

Dec. 13, 2005

Courtesy American Society for Cell Biology and World Science staff

Scientists say they are unraveling a longstanding mystery of how a rare syndrome causes its victims to die in their early teens, apparently of old age.

The answer could do more than help those children, researchers say. It could also lead to a better understanding of how normal aging happens, and what if anything one could do to stop it.

An estimated one in 8 million children are born with the condition, called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. They start life in apparent good health but by six to 18 months develop signs of premature aging, including hair loss, stiff joints, osteoporosis and atherosclerosis. Typically, they die by 13, finished by heart attacks or strokes.

No effective treatments are known, although scientists reported last September that a drug currently being tested against cancer might help the patients.

The cause of the condition, too, remains unknown. But researchers reported one breakthrough in 2003. They traced the condition to a spontaneous mutation in a gene encoding a component of the cell nucleus, the compartment of a cell that stores our genes.

Megan Nighbor, 5, a progeria patient. Her family, which has been appointed as the U.S. Progeria Research Foundation's Ambassador Family for progeria outreach, describes her as a bundle of energy who loves horses. (Photo courtesy of the Markesan Regional Reporter and the Progeria Research Foundation)

See the rest of the story continued here.

Progeria is a despicable disease. I would have to say that in fact it exceeds normal aging in loathsomeness. It robs beautiful children of their lives and time to enjoy life as much as they deserve. Their inner beauty always out-shining their outer, if you've ever had occasion to become familiar with them -- perhaps through a Discovery Channel documentary, they sparkle with joy and hope and love of life, what little of it this terrible disease affords them. We could all take lessons from them on how to appreciate the magical thing that mere existence is.

Let's hope this disease is soon to meet the dustbin of history and along with it that other thief of life that unfortunately plagues everyone plain-old every day aging itself. For even for these precious children, if they were to be cured of their premature aging, that old Dragon-Tyrant awaits them still.

This just in -- U.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High

In one respect this is very good news indeed, but stay tuned.

U.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High

By MIKE STOBBE, Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA - U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high _ 77.6 years _ and deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, the government reported Thursday.

To put this in the shortest and sweetest terms, this is exactly the result of Rejuvenation Engineering. However, due to human nature there is a catch.

Still, the march of medical progress has taken a worrisome turn: Half of Americans in the 55-to-64 age group _ including the oldest of the baby boomers _ have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese. That means they are in worse shape in some respects than Americans born a decade earlier were when they were that age.

The health of this large group of the near-elderly is of major concern to American taxpayers, because they are now becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security.

"What happens to this group is very important because it's going to affect every other group," said Amy Bernstein of the National Center for Health Statistics, which put out the new report.

As I alluded to above human nature disrupts a very good thing. So the way I see it what must be done is to kick this horse in the flanks with sharper spurs than have been used in the past. By sharper spurs I mean of course a lot more money. All the effort to raise the life expectancy until now has been a happy accident. I mean it is the result of blind efforts to simply fight disease, repair injury and improve the human condition.

As many are catching onto it's time now to take the more direct approach and actively fund research efforts toward the ends of curing aging. Along the way many of these problems spoke of in this article will be addressed directly because different remedies for aging will cross apply. The problems caused by lazy human nature such as obesity and lack of care for optimum health are in part caused by apathy toward life that until now has been seen as short and aging inevitable. These will be addressed by a change in public attitude toward living longer, a change that will come when they realize the goal is possible when it is accomplished in a an animal model such as promoted by the Mprize. When this happens the general public will come onboard in droves.

Please read the original report available here. It goes on to talk about differences in generations ten years apart, those born in the 30's compared to those born in the 40's, the so called baby boomers. The inference in the entire report is that Social Security and Medicare will be strained by people living longer so efforts are being made to encourage better health to assuage the cost.

As those in the Life Extension movement know quite well, the best answer to fixing the woes of Social Security and Medicare are to cure aging, period. For one, people won't need to retire if they are youthful for longer or rejuvenated to restored youthful health. They will then have the time and mental maturity to better handle finances and place themselves in positions of safer long term compound interest investment that allow them to not need government or even industry retirement pension plans.

If you like these ideas and like the possibility to live to see many generations of grand children and the wonders that a vastly more technical and connected world may offer in the future, then please by all means possible step up and help us fund the effort to first garner wider public support for Life Extension via the animal model I spoke of above. Currently the Methuselah Mouse Prize is in my mind the best prospect for this. You may click the mouse logo in the upper right of my blog to go directly to the donation page. Do consider a long term commitment that cost merely the same as a cup of coffee a day, consider joining The Three Hundred a group of highly motivated forward thinking smart people pioneering a brighter path for us all.

The promise of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine

I've talked about the wonders of Nanotechnology before both here and in the Rejuvenation Engineering News section of the Mprize website. A recent post here left you all with a promise to make more sense foor you what this Nanotech is all about. This is the fulfillment of that promise.

I've posted but a few articles in RE News that show only the tip of the iceberg of what we hope to see coming down the pike. The following article is not about nanomedicine per se but it can give us a glimpse of what is hoped for. See the picture of the little, I mean, tiny tiny little car they made with but a very few atoms! Well one day we hope that tiny robots somewhat bigger than the little car but still way smaller than human cells will be able to move around inside and outsdide of cells and work on them to keep them healthy. They will be directly applicable to Aubrey de Grey's SENS theory for curing aging. In fact not only that but they will, as theorized and dreamed, be capable of what in past times would be considered magic!

As Isaac Asimov once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Nanotechnology promises to give us the power over matter itself... such power as to bend matter to our will down to the single atom. Ability like that would surely seem as though magical if one could be witnessed by someone from a former era. Nanomaterials and Molecular Manufacturing hold great promise and fill the dreams of many an innovator and futurist. At some level or other all these concepts, Nanomaterials, Nanomedicine and Molecular Manufacturing are all currently in extremely rapid development.

When you can place individual atoms in precise location or martial tiny robots around within the body to affect repairs, or even changes, you then have the abilty to do some very interesting things indeed. Imagine being able to change your hair color by thinking about it. Imagine tiny scrubbers keeping toxic buildup flushed out and artificial immunity devices keeping harmful bacteria and viruses at bay. Or how about automatic nail clipping?

I know I've dreamt up some pretty silly applications and some perhaps a bit practical here but my purpose is to spur the imagination. If something so mundane as hair color and nail length can be done what else may be possible? Robert Freitas, who wrote the book on Nanomedicine, figuratively and literally has dreamed up quite a few not so mundane uses. One is called Respirocytes, bascally tiny canistors of oxygen acting as artificial blood cells. See the image here below right:

With these little gems running around in your blood stream you might be able to hold your breath longer than a whale. You could have a heart attack and have it completely stop and yet go have a sandwich before worrying too much about getting to the hospital. The Respirocytes would keep your brain going and all your tissues well oxygenated and alive for several hours.

Getting back to the little nanocar, what we believe possible and one should see as such from the little car is the ability to make tiny little robots to do all these things and so many many more that I have mentioned above. Read the article I've exerpted below and visit the links I have listed further below to get a good look at the current boon in Nanotechnology going on and that is only getting more exciting and faster in pace as every day passes.

"World's smallest car" built

Oct. 22, 2005

Courtesy Rice University and World Science Staff

Humvee, move over.

Scientists say they have made the world's smallest car--a single-molecule "nanocar" that has wheels, axles and a chassis. They describe the device in a paper due to appear in an upcoming issue of the research journal Nano Letters.

Building such machines is a step toward regularly manufacturing things of this size, which could be useful for many purposes, said James M. Tour of Rice University in Houston, Texas, one of the developers.

"We'd eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that. They're helping us learn the ground rules."

The nanocar has a pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles, the researchers said. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece.

"Nanoscale" objects like this reported car are objects whose sizes are measured in nanometers, or millionths of a millimeter.

The car is just 3 or 4 nanometers wide, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA, the researchers said. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers wide.

Other research groups have created nanoscale objects that are shaped like automobiles. But study co-author Kevin F. Kelly, also of Rice, claimed Rice's vehicle is the first that actually functions like a car, rolling on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles.[continued]

See the link embedded in the article title for the original and rest of the article. Below you will find more information to become more aquainted with the world of Nanotechnology.

The shear frantic pace of nanotechnology development: Viewing the shear volume of articles at the two following links will give the reader a good idea why those watching this speak in terms of exponential growth and development.

Nanotech News Net

SmallTimes

The concept for nanomedicine as seen by one of the primary designers and conceivers: Check out Robert Freitas' two books regarding proposed designs for nanotechnological medical devices.

Nanomedicine

Examples of the pace of nanomedical device development: Well over 1000 articles!

Nanotech Web

Businessweek

SmallTimes

The Future of Teeth and Dental Medicine

At the RE News section for the Mprize website I have in the past introduced a several new dental procedures that promise to keep us in teeth during longer years of life lived through the auspices of Life Extension technologies. There is the article, "New jaw bone grown in back of man", which one could apply to the rebuilding of damaged jaw bones when the worst happens or peridontal disease takes it's toll on teeth and their substructure. There is also, "[Magic] Toothpaste fixes cavities as they appear", which better than ever controls cavities keeping teeth from decay and loss for far lobger. And finally there is, "Research fills dental need", about newer improved filling methods. One may also have heard of Stem Cell technology for producing "Tooth Buds" for replacing lost teeth. Those should replace the technology that is now replacing dentures -- the implants mentioned in this article below.

Imagine a world without dentures...

By Debra McCown, USA TODAY Mon Dec 5, 7:23 AM ET

There are people out there who don't floss their teeth.

Shocked? Some of them don't brush, either. Some damage their teeth by smoking. And some never go to the dentist.

Even so, oral health is improving.

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health found that oral health has improved among all age groups, all racial groups, and all income levels. It also found that the proportion of adults over 60 who have lost all their teeth has dropped from one-third to one-fourth over the past decade.

The non-brushing minority aside, nowadays most people know how to take care of their teeth, and in addition to toothpaste and fluoridated water, today's young people are experiencing the benefits of advances such as dental sealants, which help prevent teeth from decaying.

Consequently, there are those, including Richard Price, spokesman for the American Dental Association, who can see the day when people don't have to wear dentures anymore.[continued]

Coming down the pike: Nano-based antiradiation drug

I swear I'm not trying to turn this blog into a Nanotech blog. There certainly are plenty of those! But in reality Nanotech will come to dominate the medical field as we forge our way into this fabulous future to come and unfolding as we watch innovation after innovation occurring between eye blinks. It is only natural that it do so because working at the smallest scale possible, so to speak, from the bottom up -- brick by brick (in this case molecule by molecule and atom by atom), is the best possible method of fine tuning the processes of life. For the human body his will have enormous impact! Hehe, tiny things having "enormous" impact, truly ironic , is it not?

I have more nano based articles yet to post. Before that I beleieve I will in my next post, in order to better initiate my readership, cover the concept of Nanomedicine by introducing the size of the nano world and the interesting possibilities because of it via a neat little (no pun intended) demonstration recently achieved. Stay tuned!

Nano World: Nano-based antiradiation drug

By Charles Q. Choi

Nov 29, 2005, 23:46 GMT

NEW YORK, NY, United States (UPI) -- Balls of carbon atoms called buckyballs only a nanometer or billionth of a meter in diameter could serve as future antiradiation drugs to help protect against the side effects of cancer therapies or against dirty bombs, experts told UPI`s Nano World.

Radiation therapy and chemotherapy are the standard treatments for cancer, but they each take a toll on the body. Radiation damages skin, mouth, throat and bowel cells and can lead to fatigue, nausea, diarrhea and permanent hair loss, while chemotherapy can produce hearing loss and damage a number of organs, including the heart and kidneys.

Article continues at original website, see link above.

Study: Exercise Can Add 3 Years to Life

This article regarding the life extending benefits of exercize might at first seem to not really fit the criterion for RE News but I think it can come pretty close if we consider a few things unique about our times. Consider that we nowadays have the ability to use high tech engineered methods to get exercise that in the past we instead crudely got daily through hard work. In fact time constraints sometimes force us to use these more concentrated methods than working all day, so to speak, "on the back forty" because fewer people in developed nations are farmers or work other close to nature type occupations these days.

However, that being said it must also be noted that high tech exercise methods are far superior to the daily grind that ground most people down literally to their graves in the past despite the health benefits. Injuries were common as was stress damage. Today we have controlled weight lifting, for instance, that can protect one's back not to mention the knowledge to greater understand what we're doing. Also no one 100 years ago and beyond ever heard the word aerobics. We have also have the benefit of low impact running capabilities with special machines. If we consider "Sports Medicine" and the high tech exercise and study done there then we truly are encroaching Rejuvination Engineering protocols. That is part of why I felt this warranted mentioning here on the Rejuv-N-Nation Blog but not necessarily on the Mprize website proper Rejuvination Engineering News section.

Here's the first part of the article. I hope the link stays current. If not I'll look into caching it perhaps on the Mprize website.

Study: Exercise Can Add 3 Years to Life

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO - People who exercise can add three years to their life, and their hearts reap benefits from something as simple as brisk walking a half-hour a day, two studies suggest.

"Three years of extra life: It's a very clear message that makes it easy to grasp what might be the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle," said Dr. Oscar Franco, co-author of one of the studies and a researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Do check out the original article.