The brain, largely known as "The Final Frontier of Science", and how it ages is still a wildly exciting subject of study for the neuro-Lewis and Clarkes of our generation. Remarkable new experiments are being performed by researchers at John Hopkins University and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. Young and old volunteers come in and watch pictures flash before a screen as the scientists literally watch their brains.

Neuroscientists have already established with the use of brain scans that a substantial bit of the electrical activity and blood flow that is associated with memory processing happens in the dentate gyrus, an area within the hippocampus, known to be involved with learning and thinking.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their study involves use of advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to scan the dentate gyrus and various areas within the brains of the volunteers at the very moment of their attempting to form and store certain new memories.

This is how it was done: A series of pictures of everyday objects such as fruit, pianos, computers, and telephones were shown to the volunteers who wore head sensors. Each were asked to press a button to indicate whether each picture was typically found indoors or outside. They were not told to remember these images. Later, after being shown another set of images, the volunteers were asked if they remembered seeing the specific before, or if seemed similar to one they saw before, of if the picture was completely new to them while the research team kept track of neural activity throughout both tasks.

The results aren't surprising. The young adults were adept at differentiating the images as to whether they were brand-new, already seen or similar but not the same as an earlier image--one example being that a baby grand piano is not the same as a full grand.
"There would be a lot of activity when young people saw either new or similar objects," said Michael A. Yassa, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the study.

The activity indicates that the young people's brains were acquiring and filing the information of the new images as 'New Images', even when they were quite similar to images that they had seen from the first set. As for the older volunteers aged 60-80, they were less successful at pattern separation- the ability to differentiate between things that are quite similar. Their dentate gyri showed far less activity when they were shown a similar, not identical images. Apparently, their brains didn't create a completely new memory to correspond to the similar images, so that the photo of the baby grand piano seemed no different than the photo of the full grand. This way, the baby grand piano would be described as an "old" image, when in fact, it was a new one. Make sense?

Dr. Yassa's work suggests that aging blunts our ability to separate today's parking spot from yesterday's, from today's breakfast from last week's. There are many different ways to process memories but one of the more important for everyday functioning is pattern separation. "Otherwise [memories] can override one another and confuse things." Part of the problem, Yassa believes, is structural.

A separate section of his experiments involved newly developed MRI scanning technology. With this he found that the dentate gyrus in the majority of the older volunteers were not linked as robustly to the rest of the brain as in young people, meaning that messages did not flow as efficiently from elsewhere in the brain to the dentate gyrus memory center and vice versa.

However, there's hope. "Exercise is one of the things that might directly change this process," says Dr. Yassa. From other experiments, exercise was found to jump-start neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells, especially in the dentate gyrus, potentially improving that area's health and functioning. This definitely was the case in rodents. The National Institute on Aging conducted an encouraging study in 2010 where mice that voluntarily ran on exercise wheels displayed an 'enhanced' ability to separate closely spaced squares on a display screen (the animal equivalent of pattern recognition), compared with sedentary mice. The active rodents also had far more new neurons in their dentate gyri than those that didn't run.

Dr. Yassa is including measures of physical fitness and exercise history as part of his ongoing research and the results look promising, he says. "What I'd say for now is that you can't go wrong by exercising," he said. "We don't know if it can reverse any damage if you already have memory slips. But there are indications that might slow or possibly prevent memory deterioration, if you begin exercising early enough."

References:

Yassa, Michael A., Aaron T. Mattfeld, Shauna M. Stark, and Craig E. L. Stark. "Age-related Memory Deficits Linked to Circuit-specific Disruptions in the Hippocampus." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academy of Sciences, 9 May 2011. Web. 26 May 2011. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/05/1101567108.

Posted by Swervesome at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

CLICK: http://www.foresight.org/reunion

A rockstar lineup of speakers include:

Comments on previous meetings in this series: http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/Comments/

Posted by Swervesome at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A leading cause of death, illness, and disability in the U.S., an estimated 10 million American adults were diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in 2000, though data from a national health survey suggests that as much as 24 million were actually affected. In 2000 alone, 119,000 deaths and over 726,000 hospitalizations were caused by COPD. 2003 brought in 124,816 deaths.

Fortunately, results from a study presented at the ATS 2011 International Conference in Denver, Colorado reveal that vitamin D supplements may help patients with COPD benefit more from pulmonary rehabilitation programs.

Miek Hornikx, a Belgian physiotherapist and doctoral student in the department of pneumology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium says

"Our study shows that high doses of vitamin D supplementation on top of a standard rehabilitation program improve the outcome in terms of exercise capacity and respiratory muscle strength."

50 COPD patients with a history of exacerbations and referrals for rehabilitation were randomly assigned to receive either a monthly dose of vitamin D or a placebo over the course of three months. At the beginning of the period and again after the completion of the rehabilitation programs, peripheral and respiratory muscle strength, exercise capacity and vitamin D levels were measured. Patients were also asked to complete a quality of life survey before and after.

The vitamin D group were administered 100,000 IUs (internation units) of vitamin D in their monthly dose - the recommended U.S. daily allowance of vitamin D is 600 IUs daily for adults up to age 70 and 800 IUs daily for those over 70. Vitamin D deficiency is common among COPD patients and is often linked with diet and lack of sunlight exposure. Often, sufferers are limited in physical activity as a result of difficulty breathing associated with the disease, perhaps resulting in less exposure to sunlight. It's a bit of a tricky situation that way.

"COPD can be considered as a respiratory disease with important non-respiratory consequences, such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and muscle weakness," she said. "These consequences eventually will be negatively influenced by physical inactivity which, along with exercise intolerance, is a common feature among patients with COPD and is proven to be related to mortality. Low levels of vitamin D in the blood have been related with muscle weakness, a major target for respiratory rehabilitation and increased risk of falls."

She adds, "Since vitamin D is often depleted in patients with COPD, we wanted to see if vitamin D supplementation would have a beneficial effect on rehabilitation among these patients, perhaps by increasing muscle strength."

The results were heartening: At the end of the study, researchers found that patients treated with vitamin D had a significant improvement in exercise capacity and respiratory muscle strength compared to the placebo group.

"These results support the idea that correcting vitamin D deficiency by adding vitamin D supplements to training programs allows COPD patients to achieve better results from rehabilitation, including improvements in muscle strength and exercise capacity," Ms. Hornikx said.

References:
Schoenstadt, MD, Arthur. "COPD Statistics: An Overview." EMedTV. Clinaero, Inc. Web. 20 May 2011.
http://copd.emedtv.com/copd/copd-statistics.html.

"Vitamin D Improves Exercise Outcomes in Patients With COPD." Science Daily. Science Daily LLC, 15 May 2011. Web. 20 May 2011. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110515201306.htm.

Posted by Swervesome at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"There's a very good chance that this study will eventually have a major impact on many disorders that afflict humankind," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal where the study is published. "These scientists have basically used the body's repair mechanisms to make new tissues through bioengineering. In years to come, starfish and salamanders will have nothing on us!"

A new method discovered by Yale scientists could be a major milestone in the science of human tissue regeneration and engineering. Because of their discovery, new evidence is provided to support a major shift in the paradigm of the accepted science of tissue engineering from the concept that cells added to a graft pre-implantation are the building blocks of tissue, to a new concept that engineered tissue constructs can actually mobilize the body's own reparative mechanisms. This includes complex tissue regeneration.

"We believe that through an understanding of human vascular biology, coupled with technologies such as tissue engineering, we can introduce biological grafts that mimic the functional properties of native vessels and that are capable of growing with the patients," said Christopher K. Breuer from Yale University School of Medicine.

Breuer and colleagues conducted a three-part study in mice, beginning with two groups. The first expressed a gene that made all its cells fluorescent green. The second was normal.

The first part of the study involved extracting bone marrow cells from the mice that expressed green cells, the researchers added them to previously designed biodegradable scaffolds. They then implanted the grafts into the normal mice. The bone marrow-derived mononuclear cells (BMMCs) improved the performance of the graft, but there was a rapid loss of green cells. The cells developed in the new vessel wall were noted to be normal. This suggests that the seeded cells promoted vessel development but they did not turn into vessel wall cells themselves.

In the second part of the study, the team tested whether the cells produced in the host's bone marrow might be a feasible source for new cells. They replaced the bone marrow cells of a female mouse with those of a male mouse before implanting the graft into a group of female mice. The new vessel was formed by cells of the female, so they did not come from the male bone marrow cells.

The final section of the study involved implanting a segment of vessel from the male attached to the scaffold into a female host. They then found that the side of the graft next to the male segment developed with male vessel wall cells while the side attached to the female host's vessel formed from female cells. This proves that the cells in the new vessel must have migrated from the adjacent normal vessel. Breuer and his colleagues demonstrated that bone marrow is not a significant source of endothelial or smooth muscle cells that comprise the neovessel and that the adjacent vessel wall is the main source of these endothelial and smooth muscle cells that form 93% of proximal neotissue.

These findings have important implications regarding fundamental mechanisms underlying neotissue formation; in this setting, the tissue-engineered construct functions by mobilizing the body's innate healing capabilities to "regenerate" neotissue from preexisting committed tissue cells.

Reference:

"New Method for Engineering Human Tissue Regeneration." Science Daily. Science Daily LLC, 13 May 2011. Web. 17 May 2011. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512161932.htm.

Posted by Swervesome at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Take the current paradigm for an average life span: Start working in the mid to late teens, go to college, slave through your adulthood, retire in your mid-sixties and spend the rest of your days in a rocking chair with a lemonade in hand, playing chess in the park, crocheting, or on the golf range. Of course, there's also a much bleaker picture associated with the conventional concept of old age. Smelly nursing homes, negligent caregivers, dull retirement communities... you get the picture. By this stage in life, most people expect that it won't (it just can't) last for very long.

But demographers predict that by 2030, average life expectancy will have climbed past 80 and citizens over 65 will make up more than 20 percent of the country's population. The world's population is aging at unprecedented rates; more are exceeding 80 years than ever before and the baby boomer bulge is swelling the ranks of those in their 60s and beyond. Along with the transformations that are already occurring in the makeup of the U.S. workforce, the health care system, and even the layout of cities, the needs and desires of the elderly will become a more important and prominent aspect of our culture. The years after age 65 will account for an increasingly large portion of our lives, whether we be mere witnesses of it at present in our youth or caregivers for our parents or living our elderly years now.

So it might be a failure of imagination to continue with the accepted perception that even as old age lasts longer and becomes more prevalent in society, the concept of elderly institutionalization and other expectations of life as an elderly person will remain intact. The very definition of "Old Age" is evolving into something that scientists and Life Extensionists like you and me can be a little more comfortable with. Of course, there is still so much that needs doing and supporting Methuselah Foundation is an excellent way to fortify the concentrated efforts into making Old Age a healthier, less limiting and much more fulfilling time in one's life.

"We're looking at people living 30 to 40 years longer than they did 100 years ago," said Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab. "More of your adult life will be lived after the age of 50 than before age 50.

The question is, what're you going to do with it?"