Tag Archives: ageing

Treat Your Neck With Respect

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turkey neck

With all the advertising campaigns going on about how to keep the skin on your face youthful, the most recognisable thing I have noticed with all the beauty hype is that there is little mention of the neck and yes the décolletage area (chest) is classed as the body but in “beauty therapy terms” the neck and chest are to be treated in the same way as your face.

If you’re in your early twenties or thirties you may think this article has nothing to do with you yet…. but it does, you need to take action before the skin around your neck and chest starts to show signs of ageing!

Remember the saying “prevention is better than the cure”. Well this is definitely the case when it comes to caring for your skin and keeping it young – especially in the neck and décolletage area.

Stress, smoking and sun damage all contribute to a skin that has nothing to do with the D.O.B on your birth certificate. The neck is one of the first places to show premature ageing as well as the chest. Skin is so much thinner in these areas, so a little TLC will go a long way.

How many times do you see a mature woman with – dare I say it “a turkey neck” or a crêpey chest trying to cover up with a scarf. Do you want this to be you in years to come?

With spring around the corner and lower neck lines starting to appear in the shops, we should all start to think about looking after this part of our body you will be so thankful in later years that you did.

Here’s how…

1. Collagen is the most important structure of the skin this keeps skin young, to keep it restored eat plenty of antioxidant foods such as fruit and veg.

2. Drink plenty of water throughout the day- water plump’s up the skin cells, giving it a more youthful look.

3. Cleanse your neck with a hydrating cleanser.

4. Use a mild exfoliator around neck and décolletage area.

5. Use a hydrating face mask to both areas.

6. Boost circulation around neck and chest area by splashing with cold water

7. Apply a rich hydrating/firming neck cream in both areas (if you’d sooner – after five minutes dab of the excess moisture with soft tissue). In the day time using a moisturiser with a sun block will be beneficial – never let the neck dry out, especially if exposed to the sun

8. Avoid spraying perfume directly onto the neck and chest area- as this is drying to the skin and over time will cause it to become crêpey.

9. With the top of your hand you can gently slap the underside of your neck 10 times, this will firm it.

10. Try reading a Carol Maggio facercise book. It will have neck exercises in it.

Come on all you ladies out there, start treating your neck with respect! If you ever run out of cream, don’t forget that there is always good old fashion Vaseline, so there really is no excuse for letting your neck and skin get old before it’s time.

Image reproduced from youbeauty.com

Is Ageing A Disease?

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ageingWith mice being genetically engineered to live 26% longer than average, age-incidence of a broad spectrum of age-related disease being reduced in the lab and dietary restriction significantly increasing lifespan across species, research seeking treatment for ageing is in action. Telomere modification, free radical level reduction and human growth hormone replacement, all dawn as promising avenues, which may not only decelerate, but may one day reverse the changes associated with ageing. Whilst, current knowledge of the biology of ageing remains too incomplete to assess whether interventions, such as the above, will one day extend average and maximum lifespan, one must the core question: Is ageing even a disease?

Diseases should be cured, it is accepted that this includes age-related diseases. From cancer to neurodegenerative diseases, age is the major risk factor for the majority of these serious illnesses. Treating each individual disease, has a relatively small effect on life expectancy, compared to tackling the process of ageing itself was treated. The definition of disease is historically ambiguous and sensitive to cultural perspectives, homosexuality used to be thought of as a mental illness and late-onset Alzheimer’s disease was only defined as a pathology in 1977. Disease is regarded clinically as the state in which the limits of the normal have been transgressed, health is considered in terms of the absence of disease and expected level of function, at a given gender and age. As ageing is universal, it would seem it is natural, but this does not alter the reality that ageing is a deterioration of normal function. If chronological devices exist, all bodies that exist can be said to age relative to the measurements provided by this, in this way physicians are interested in a set of biological changes over time, such as a higher frequency of cells with chromosomal aberrations in the elderly to decreased melanin formation and white hairs (Hayflick 1974), these changes are universal and inevitable. However, universality and inevitability do not disproof ageing as a disease, rather a special type of disease which everyone inevitably endures.

As one ages, a number of pathologies are gained, to include loss of homeostasis and molecular damage accumulation, which result in the same outcome as severe disease states – death. The perspective of modern biogerontology concludes there is little to distinguish ageing from  a disease state, yet there is a reluctance to view ageing itself as a disease. These unremarkable natural processes in the aged, are confidently viewed as disease where they occur in the young, for example consider the premature ageing disease, progeria. Weismann (1891) argued that ageing and debilitation must be seen as the organism’s new mutational and adaptive responses to fluctuating environments, so ageing benefits the population by removing the superannuated and allowing evolutionary change to take place, which implies ageing to be a very natural part of life. Paradoxically, the evolutionary theory of ageing (ageing being a consequence of a reduction in the force of selection against mutations with deleterious effects later in life, leads to accumulation within population alleles with deleterious effects) potentially illustrates ageing as a lethal genetic disease, with no purpose in terms of fitness. It has been put forward, that evolutionary selection rarely act on entire species or population, rather on individuals and their phenotypic traits which may confer an advantage in certain environments, increasing the likelihood of passing on genes. In this way it is more likely that ageing can be seen as a lethal genetic disease, rather than an evolutionary process under selection. So should ageing be redefined? It seems appropriate, furthermore, a clinical redefinition of ageing as a disease state may lead to added benefits, such as proper safety and efficiency testing of anti-ageing treatments.

Obvious personal, social, economic and environmental problems spring to mind when considering life extension, although a similar change occurred since ancient times (e.g. compare Ancient Assyrians Hebrews and Romans to Syrians, israelis greeks and italians today there has been an increase from 35 to 75 years) and human nature has been able to cope, granted this is no proof that it will be able to do it again given a much greater scale of change. Nevertheless, this does not hold as a compelling argument against the research; with a clever enough government, policies can be put in place when the time comes.

Image reproduced from scmnewused.blogspot.com

Live Young and Prosper: The Dauer Way

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The global average life expectancy during the early twentieth century was 31 years; today it stands at 67.2 years. The “Big Three”: food, health and hygiene are being hailed as miracle life longevity factors; however improving overall quality of life is far more complex than simply extending it. Without actually slowing down the pace at which we age, all this proposes is potentially a greater number of years spent with age related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. But how much do we truly understand about aging?

35 genes believed to determine lifespan have been unveiled by research at the Louisiana State University Health Centre, coding for a wide range of cellular functions they indicate aging is multifactorial. At least four physiological processes are thought to play a role in aging including metabolic control, resistance to stress, gene deregulation and gene stability. Scientists will persevere in unravelling the mystery of aging and the complexity of the process means it may be one of the hardest nuts we will ever try to crack. The very nature of aging makes it difficult to gather substantial data; long term experimentation on human beings is unfeasible due to the crippling time constraints. Nevertheless, when there is a will there is a way and this is where model organisms step in.

Caenorhabditis elegans

The nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans makes an excellent aging model organism; living 2-3 weeks, the hermaphrodites among them are able to produce around 300 genetically identical offspring, providing the advantage of allele homozygosis and its small 97 megabase genome is fully sequenced. Most importantly, the Caenorhabditis elegans shares 35% similar genes with us, that are used as candidate human longevity genes and the development stages of each somatic cell are known from zygote to adult worm. Going through the complex developmental processes of embryogenesis, morphogenesis and growth, in four stages (L1, L2, L3 and L4) there is plenty to suggest that what we learn from the Caenorhabditis elegans may be directly applicable to us. When placed in harsh conditions, the L1 and L2 larvae become dauer larvae with delayed development and dark intestines produced by storage of fat. When the harsh conditions subside they re-enter the developmental process, carrying on as normal. This may seem insignificant, however these dauer larvae live 10 times the average lifespan of a normal nematode, in human terms that means reaching the age of about 700!

A study carried out by Golden JW and Riddle DL identified pheromone, food and temperature as dauer-inducing factors. The pheromone is a measure of population density, causing dauer formation at L2 and inhibiting recovery based on pheromone dose. Lack of food causes caloric restriction, a method which has also proven to extend lifespan in rodents. The enhancement of the dauer larvae formation needs exposure to high temperature at L1 stage. Two sensory mutants defective in thermotaxis have altered sensitivity to the pheromone but the pheromone response remains temperature dependent. The ways in which the dauer respond to inducing factors was found to be age dependent, with the older larvae having a greater tendency to recover. The dauer larvae seem to able to control the pace at which that metaphorical clock ticks, no doubt the day we learn to apply this in humans will be pivotal to the very nature of science.

To date the oldest age a human being has got to is 122 years, while average lifespan has certainly increased, maximum lifespan is yet to be understood and manipulated. As technology develops, our knowledge will continue to grow and maybe soon birthday cards will go up to 700 years or more.

Images reproduced from raindeocampo.wordpress.com and web.expasy.org

Technology, Time and Ageing

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The question that many polymaths, scientists, technology-enthusiasts and intellectuals have been curious about ever since educational institutions were introduced is- will the world reach the period where the length of human life can be expanded? Many individuals in the global society have wished to look younger when their facial characteristics started aging and do surgical procedures as well as use cosmetics as a feature of the extended human phenotype to fulfill their desires. Technology has extended the phenotype of man to unprecedented heights. Human technologies differ from animal technologies in their inventiveness, multiplicity and sophistication. Noted experts throughout the ages have searched for the formula to the miraculous phenomenon: “Can one turn back the clock of time?” Although time travel has been a traditional plot device in science fiction since the late 19th century and the theories of special and general relativity allow methods for forms of one-way travel into the future via time dilation, it is currently unrevealed whether the laws of physics would permit time travel into the past.

Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, propose that suitable geometries of spacetime, or specific types of motion in space, might allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions are possible. In technical papers, physicists generally avoid the commonplace language of “moving” or “traveling” through time (“movement” normally refers only to an adjustment in spatial position as the time coordinate is varied), and instead discuss the potentiality of closed timelike curves, which are world lines that form closed loops in spacetime, allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves (such as Gödel spacetime), but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.

Many in the scientific community believe that backwards time travel is highly implausible. Any theory that would allow time travel would require that problems of causality be resolved. The classic example of a problem involving causality is the “grandfather paradox”: what if one were to go back in time and kill one’s own grandfather before one’s father was conceived? However, some scientists believe that paradoxes can be avoided, by appealing either to the Novikov self-consistency principle or to the notion of branching parallel universes.

Nevertheless, the theory of general relativity does suggest a scientific basis for the possibility of backwards time travel in certain unusual scenarios, although arguments from semiclassical gravity suggest that when quantum effects are incorporated into general relativity, these loopholes may be closed. These semiclassical arguments led theoretical physicists to formulate the chronology protection conjecture, suggesting that the fundamental laws of nature prevent time travel, but physicists cannot come to a definite judgment on the issue without a theory of quantum gravity to join quantum mechanics and general relativity into a completely unified theory.

Dr. Bill Andrews has spent two decades solving the molecular mechanisms of aging. His mission is to extend the human life span to 150 years or die trying. In the 1990s, as the director of molecular biology at the Bay Area biotech firm Geron, Andrews supported a team of researchers that, in alliance with a laboratory at the University of Colorado, just barely beat out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a furious, near-decade-long race to identify the human telomerase gene. This basic science took on the trappings of a hysterical Great Race is a testament to the biological preciousness of telomerase, an enzyme that maintains the ends of our cells’ chromosomes, called telomeres.

Telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides, and when they get too short the cell can no longer make fresh copies of itself. If humans live long enough, the tissues and organ systems that count on continued cell replication begin to falter: The skin sags, the internal organs grow slack, the immune-system response weakens such that the next chest flu could be the last. Telomerase was first discovered by Professor Elizabeth Blackburn and Molecular Biologist Carol W. Greider who were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for this work. Though, what if bodies could be induced to express more Telomerase? That is what Dr. Andrews intends to do in order to prolong human life which would demonstrate one of the greatest breakthroughs on planet earth.

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