Hourglass VII: biology of aging blog carnival

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I am fortunate to be hosting the first Hourglass carnival of 2009, on this historical day of Obama’s inauguration. There is a sense of great hope for both America in general, but also more specifically for improvements in health care under his administration. We will have to wait and see if his health policies include the biology of aging, so people can possibly have more healthier years as they age.

Speaking of health policies, Reason from Fight Aging provides two posts that cover funding of longevity research: LifeStar Project, and the Glenn Foundation). Reason’s third contribution is about the biology of ‘poorly liganded iron’ and how it contributes to oxidative damage and might shed light on the conflicting results seen with many antioxidant studies.

Walther Flemming's 1882 diagram of eukaryotic ...

Alex Palazzo over at The Daily Transcript gives us a very interesting introduction into the cell polarity theory of aging. With all the current interest in stem cells this theory could get plenty of attention and research, which will help provide additional information regarding this theory.

Chris Patil from Ouroboros informs us about the interesting bridge between calorie restriction, DNA damage, and transcriptional deregulation in aging. It is an intriguing story about how Sirt1 (which increases with calorie restriction), among its many other jobs, both depresses transcription and also when required goes off to repair broken DNA.

Transmission electron micrograph of a myelinat...
Image via Wikipedia

Mo at Neurophilosophy (great blog name) posts about a subject matter which I think will garner a great deal of attention in the coming years – aging and myelin. The traditional theory of brain aging usually concentrates on the loss of neurons as we age. However, Mo post concentrates of the loss of myelin and how it correlates with the behavioural decline in a number of cognitive measurements. By reading his post you will find out what correlates best with the cognitive decline observed with age – loss of neurons or loss of myelin.

My contribution to this carnival centers around the possible effects of antidepressants on life span, and how two different labs can get completely opposite results – read to found out why.

The next Hourglass blog carnival will occur on the regular cycle (2nd Tuesday of each month): February 10th at SharpBrains. Please send your submission to hourglass.host(@)gmail(.)com. So see you on February 10th for more research on the biology of aging.

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