The AI analysis found enormous variation in the health of the thymus between individual people. In some people, it stayed very active until a very old age. And other people, it actually declined very rapidly at a younger age. Importantly, thymus health correlated with a person's overall health. People who had a healthy thymus tended to live longer, have less cancer, and less cardiovascular disease.
The Israeli gerontologist has been studying healthy centenarians for years and has observed that many follow a pattern similar to Reichert's. They do not always lead a monastic, carefully balanced life. There is a great deal of biological lottery involved in longevity. But Barzilai wants to hack that lottery—to understand which numbers are the winning ones and pass them on to the rest of humanity.
Researchers administered one of four doses of stem cells to 118 people between 70 and 85 years old, all of whom had frailty. In a timed walking test nine months after treatment, those who had received the highest dose could walk about 60 metres farther, on average, than they could before treatment.
We compared how participants fared while eating their habitual diets with how they responded to the two diets that were low in ultraprocessed foods. During the periods when participants ate fewer ultraprocessed foods, they naturally consumed fewer calories and lost weight, including total and abdominal body fat. Beyond weight loss, they also showed meaningful improvements in insulin sensitivity, healthier cholesterol levels, fewer signs of inflammation, and favorable changes in hormones that help regulate appetite and metabolism.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to exercise - doing a variety of different physical activities every week is the key to boosting your health and living longer, a study suggests. After tracking the weekly exercise habits of 110,000 men and women in the US for 30 years, researchers found active people who did the greatest variety of exercise were 19% less likely to die during that time than those who focused on one activity. That effect was greater than for individual sports like walking, tennis, rowing and jogging. The total amount of exercise you do is still key, experts say, but doing a range of activities you enjoy can bring lots of benefits.
"As we get older, the immune system is shifting away from good inflammation," which is the body's short-term, acute response to fend off injury or infection and promote healing, explains Dr. Thomas Marron, one of the researchers leading the new study. Marron directs early phase clinical trials at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dementia is linked to changes in the brain. Health professionals used to assume that brain damage and dementia symptoms always went hand in hand. More recent research, however, shows that some people have significant brain damage yet never develop dementia. How can that be? In a previous post, I shared that dementia is defined by the inability to function in everyday life, such as getting lost in familiar places, having difficulty managing finances, forgetting to turn off the stove, or struggling with basic tasks.
Researchers used data from two health studies to track the caffeine-drinking habits of more than 130,000 people over four decades. They found that drinking 2-3 cups of coffee or 1-2 cups of tea a day was associated with the greatest reductions in rate of cognitive decline, a result that held true even in people with a genetic variant called APOE4, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease.
We are all going to die. No one is happy about that. Today, the internet is full of claims about diets and supplements that will help us live longer. One writer suggested that there are at least 320 longevity clinics operating around the world; some charge $100,000 or more annually for access to their magic elixirs. Unfortunately, the search for a formula that can prevent death, or delay it for a very long time, has a long history of failures.
A groundbreaking study found that adults who sit for 10 or more hours daily face a significantly higher risk of dementia compared to those who sit less. The research, which tracked over 50,000 adults using wearable devices, revealed that the risk increases dramatically after crossing that 10-hour threshold.