We discuss interventions to increase the life span on the blog quite a bit – which makes you ponder what would you do if something actually worked in humans and you were given an extra 5 years of healthy life? I found this blog piece over at PickTheBrain which covers this question from the reverse…
Category: lifespan
lifespan, longevity
60 minutes TV coverage of longevity
by Ward • • 3 Comments
Last night the 60 minutes TV show had a segment on the latest longevity research. One leading scientist in the field Richard Weindruch reported on the latest results from the National Institute of Health on primate research examining dietary restriction and said that 50% of the normally fed animals are now dead, and only around…
brain health, lifespan, longevity
Does increased social interactions improve health?
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia Yesterday, I mentioned how a paper reported that 3 weeks of dietary restriction increases social activity in rats. And we know, from many papers over the last 90 years, that dietary restriction increases the life span of organisms. Could there be a link between the two? In this weeks Science magazine there…
lifespan, longevity
Antidepressants – do they increase or decrease your life span?
by Ward • • 5 Comments
Antidepressants, as I pointed out yesterday, is the most widely use prescription drug in America. Hence you could say it is likely one of the most used brain hacks. According to an independent 2005 study 11% of American females, and 5% of men take antidepressants (this data set is excluding the institutionalized population). However, what…
lifespan, longevity
Freeze those testes: frozen in time – Part II
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia A few days ago I wrote about the group that cloned mice from tissue taken from a carcass thrown into a -80 freezer for 16 years. Now news comes that numerous bulls were cloned from tissue taken from frozen testicles (again like the mouse experiment nothing special was done to preserve the…
brain health, lifespan
Simple foods to improve your health: Part I
by Ward • • 0 Comments
Image via Wikipedia I have not covered diet much on this blog so far. Today I will give a cursory glance (Part I) at some potential foods you might want to add to your eating habits to improve your brain health. Changing your diet is one of the simplest hacks for improved brain and overall…
lifespan, longevity
A possible stimulating treatment for many of the ‘lifestyle’ diseases
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia Lifestyle diseases are the ones we induce on ourselves by how we live our lives. They include being overweight/obese, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, type II diabetes (really a spectrum here), all leading to increased cardiovascular disease (and a number of other deadly diseases such as cancer, but to a lesser amount). The…
lifespan, longevity
Clean water – 2008 health breakthrough
by Ward • • 0 Comments
I think some of the biggest breakthroughs for overall health in 2008 occurred in water purification. Paraphrasing Dean Kamen from the well known Colbert Report video: “50% of all human diseases in our world today are due to waterborne pathogens…1.1 billion people go to bed each night either thirsty or sick from drinking dirty water.” There is…
brain health, lifespan, longevity
Use of statins bad for myelination – possible long-term consequences
by Ward • • 1 Comment
Image via Wikipedia The progressive loss of myelin as we age is now thought to be an important component of brain aging (see here) – so the last thing you want is to take a drug that might interfere with the turnover and remyelination that occurs naturally (though at a reduced level as we age).…
lifespan, longevity
Every other day fasting dramatically improves survival rate after heart failure
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia Intermittent fasting dramatically improves survival rate in an animal heart attack model. Dietary restriction, in its various forms (the two main forms are a 30-40% reduction in calories called calorie restriciton (CR), and every-other-day fasting (EODF)), increases lifespan in a wide array of organisms (we have known this since the 1920s). More…