Gerontology
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The progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength and/or function with advancing age, termed sarcopenia, poses a major threat to independence and quality of life. Therefore, there is significant merit in better understanding the biology of sarcopenia and developing therapeutic interventions to prevent, slow or reverse its progression. Since the discovery of myostatin, a potent negative regulator of growth that is highly enriched in skeletal muscle, there has been great interest in it as a potential mediator of sarcopenia as well as a therapeutic target. The complex biology of myostatin, the promise of myostatin inhibition as an effective means to counter sarcopenia, and the challenges facing its clinical translation are reviewed herein.
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Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) is a rare human genetic disease that leads to a severe premature ageing phenotype, caused by mutations in the LMNA gene. The LMNA gene codes for lamin-A and lamin-C proteins, which are structural components of the nuclear lamina. HGPS is usually caused by a de novo C1824T mutation that leads to the accumulation of a dominant negative form of lamin-A called progerin. ⋯ Moreover, it seems that microRNAs and microRNA biosynthesis might play a role in HGPS. Exemplary in this connection is the suggested protective effect of miR-9 on the central nervous system of affected individuals. This mini-review will report on the state of the art of HGPS epigenetics, and there will be a discussion of how epigenetic alterations in HGPS cells can alter the cellular metabolism and lead to the systemic syndrome.
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Cognitive neuroscience of the healthy aging human brain has thus far addressed age-related changes of local functional and structural properties of gray and white matter and their association with declining or preserved cognitive functions. In addition to these localized changes, recent neuroimaging research has attributed an important role to neural networks with a stronger focus on interacting rather than isolated brain regions. The analysis of functional connectivity encompasses task-dependent and -independent synchronous activity in the brain, and thus reflects the organization of the brain in distinct performance-relevant networks. ⋯ Finally, studies using noninvasive brain stimulation techniques like transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to simultaneously modulate behavior and functional connectivity support the importance of 'selective connectivity' of aging brain networks for preserved cognitive functions. These studies demonstrate that enhancing task performance by tDCS is paralleled by increased connectivity within functional networks. In this review, we outline the network perspective on healthy brain aging and discuss recent developments in this field.
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As the world's population ages, elderly people are becoming an increasingly important group that merits special attention with regard to health and social issues. Lifestyles affect health and survival at all ages, but the consequences of poor lifestyle behaviors may be different for elderly people than for younger adults. They can also be heavily dependent on exposure earlier in life. ⋯ It focuses on behaviors modifiable by individual actions and public health interventions, such as smoking, obesity and sedentary behavior, which predispose numerous people to diseases that rank among the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and dementia. These factors not only shorten life but, when they occur together, also have a major impact on survival beyond that associated with each single lifestyle factor. We propose an integrated life course model to guide research on longevity to answer questions that remain open and to find new strategies to ensure a longer and healthier life for future generations.
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For people with dementia dying from pneumonia, hospitalization at the end of life may be of little benefit and result in unfavourable outcomes such as hospital death. ⋯ Almost half of all those with dementia dying from pneumonia and a quarter of those living in long-term care settings died in a hospital. These results suggest shortcomings in the Belgian healthcare system in preventing potentially avoidable terminal hospitalizations in a vulnerable population.