Contact: Stacey Harris
212-703-9977

Call to Action: A New Way to Prevent Diseases of Aging
is to Focus on Aging Itself

In the current (July 8, 2008) online issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal), leading researchers call for more extended support for research on aging as a way to prevent many diseases of aging. You can view the report here: here

This new model of health promotion and disease prevention describes a shift in focus from specific age-related illnesses to searching to understand aging itself as a biological process.

Authors of the paper include:
Dr. Jay Olshansky and Dr. Jacob Brody, University of Illinois at Chicago; Dr. Robert Butler, International Longevity Center; Dr. Richard Miller, University of Michigan; Daniel Perry, Alliance for Aging Research; Bruce Carnes and Dr. Marie Bernard, University of Oklahoma; Dr. T. Franklin Williams, University of Rochester; Dr. Christine Cassel, American Board of Internal Medicine in Philadelphia; Linda Partridge, University College London; Thomas Kirkwood, Newcastle University and Dr. George M. Martin, American Federation for Aging Research and University of Washington.

For 27 years, the American Federation for Aging (AFAR) has been at the forefront of this revolutionary approach to the science of healthier aging, providing more than $100 million in grants to some 2,500 scientists studying the fundamental mechanisms of aging.

AFAR's scientists have contributed findings that are dramatically changing our understanding and practice of medicine. Here are a few examples of AFAR grantees who have emerged as leaders in the field:

Nir Barzilai, MD, Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Dr. Barzilai leads a program investigating metabolic decline associated with aging and its impact on longevity, as well as a groundbreaking project to identify longevity genes in centenarians and their offspring. Dr. Barzilai and his team are well underway in the process of finding genetic markers and physiological traits that appear to correlate with extreme long life. His findings show:

• Longevity is very likely to be inherited from generation to generation;
• It is highly correlated to high hdl ("good") and low ldl ("bad) cholesterol levels;
• It is likely to occur among people with larger hdl and ldl molecule sizes---resulting in lower incidences of cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and hypertension; and
• It is associated with a polymorphism (gene variant) in genes CETP, APOC3 and ADIPOQ.

Judith Campisi, PhD, Senior Scientist, Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Member, UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center
Dr. Campisi is one of the world's leading authorities on the relationship between aging and cancer. With support from an AFAR grant, she and her colleagues were the first to propose that a crucial tumor suppressor mechanism in early life, cellular senescence, might actually increase the incidence of cancer in later life-a discovery that may lead to powerful new therapies for treating age-associated malignancies.

These studies, conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Buck Institute, have also yielded important insights into the relationship between cellular senescence and aging. Dr. Campisi's experiments have demonstrated that the number of senescent cells in the body increases as it grows older, and these cells contribute to aging by secreting specific proteins that degrade and destroy surrounding tissue and fuel the progression of cancer. Her work may yet yield new drugs or other ways to eliminate senescent cells, stop them from producing the harmful, tissue-aging substances, and even prevent age-related tumors- which account for 90 percent of all human cancers.

David A. Sinclair, PhD, Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging
In 1997, as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Lenny Guarente at M.I.T., Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues made an historic breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms of aging: they identified the cause of aging in yeast cells which led them to the discovery of the longevity gene called SIR2. The researchers found that adding extra copies of the SIR2 gene caused the yeast cells to increase their longevity by 30 percent-just as caloric restriction does. A grant from AFAR in 2000 helped expand the scope of his research, which has now gained world renown. Although the idea of using yeast as a model for human biology was at first scoffed at, he and others have demonstrated that genes from the same family, called Sirtuins, exist in every other species studied so far, from nematode worms to human beings.

This has profound implications not only for the possibility for extending lifespan, but perhaps more importantly, for preventing age associated diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's-all of which Sirtuins seem to prevent. Taking the implications of his original research even further, Dr. Sinclair and colleagues have identified Sirtuin-activating compounds (STACs) that have extended the lifespan of numerous simple model organisms. One of these STACs, resveratrol, found in red wine, can activate known longevity genetic pathways and prevent the early death of mice fed a high calorie diet. The study provides encouragement to scientists who are trying to develop drugs to prevent diseases like heart disease and diabetes that are associated with obesity in people.

Please look to AFAR and its researchers for commentary about research on aging and age-related diseases and health and social issues that affect an aging population.

Websites: www.afar.org, www.InfoAging.org.

Contact: Stacey Harris, Director of Communications, 212-703-9977 or stacey@afar.org.

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