Why do we believe that the scientific breakthrough in longevity studies is possible ?
WANT to be the first one on your block to live to 100? You are in with a fighting chance if you're the first-born child of a young mother.
Natalia Gavrilova and Leonid Gavrilov of the University of Chicago sifted through data gathered on 991 centenarians born in the US between 1875 and 1899 and used US census and Social Security Administration records to reconstruct the family histories of 198 of them, searching for anything they had in common.
It turned out that first-born children were 1.7 times as likely as their siblings to live to be 100. An even stronger predictor of longevity was how young their mother was when they were born. Those whose mothers were less than 25 years old were twice as likely to survive beyond a century.
Numerous studies demonstrate that many manifestations of aging can be postponed or even reversed, and that lifespan can be significantly extended in experimental animals. Moreover, our own studies found remarkable plasticity of human longevity (see above), and suggest that there may be a significant potential for further extension of human lifespan.
"The field of ageing research has been completely transformed in the past decade. When single genes are changed, animals that should be old stay young. In humans, these mutants would be analogous to a ninety year old who looks and feels forty-five. On this basis we begin to think of ageing as a disease that can be cured, or at least postponed. … The field of ageing is beginning to explode, because so many are so excited about the prospect of searching for -- and finding -- the causes of ageing, and maybe even the fountain of youth itself."
Cited from: Guarente, L., and Kenyon, C. (2000) Genetic pathways that regulate ageing in model organisms. Nature 408, 255-262.
Dr. Leonid A. Gavrilov is Research Associate, Center on Aging, NORC and the University of Chicago. He is Editorial Board member of Experimental Gerontology, Rejuvenation Research, The ScientificWorldJOURNAL, and Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation and is Senior Member of the Science Advisory Board of BioInformatics, LLC.
He authored Life Extension, Caloric Restriction, and Scientific Philanthropy, A mathematical model of the aging of animals, and Scientific legitimacy of the term "Anti-Aging", and coauthored Mortality of centenarians.
longevity-science.org
Picture: Leonid Gavrilov
