We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. Origin of threescore First recorded in —, threescore is from Middle English thre scoor. See three , score. Why do scientists discover similarities between human-engineered systems and creature adaptation? How does the Genesis Flood explain the Ice Age?
What do you think of riches? Some of us may instinctively equate riches with money, and therefore have a natural tendency to shy away from it and think Food, even dill pickles, can provide relevant insights for creation apologetics. It's an odd fact that, although Shakespeare took numerous phrases and examples of imagery from the Bible, the word Bible doesn't appear in any of his plays. See other phrases and sayings from Shakespeare. Three score and ten Other phrases about: Death and dying Numbers Religion.
But even these strides have shown us that in fact being able to prevent or cure all kinds of cancers is going to be a much more difficult goal to attain than people used to think perhaps 30 or 40 years ago. Is research into extending life more important than researching the quality of that life in old age?
When we think about human ageing, the real challenge that we have is to address the quality of the later years. I think very few people would thank us if we extended life but did nothing about the quality.
Already we've got a lot of extra years and I think there's great ambivalence about whether this has been an entirely good thing, given that we can expect to spend significant numbers of those years affected by diseases or conditions that rob us of a lot of quality. So, for most older people the priority is not to be able to extend life but to able to address the issues that spoil quality of life in older ages.
I think when we're young and have excellent health, excellent quality of life then it's lovely to think in terms of 'yes please, more of the same'. But the reality is we will all become old and if we don't focus on the quality of those later years, in effect adding life to those years rather than adding years to our lives, then we're heading up the wrong path.
What are your top tips for longevity? Science can give us some pretty good pointers about what we should do if we want to live a long and healthy life.
The first thing you should do is choose your parents well, because if you've got long lived parents that gives you a better expectation of long life - but of course that's not an option that's open to us. The other thing you should choose to do is be a woman, because we know that women live on the average about 5 or 6 years longer, but again that's not an option for half of us.
But if we look at the other things that are available to us in terms of the choices that we can make in life I think the most important thing to remember is that what makes us age is the build up of damage in our bodies, so we can make choices in life that will give our bodies the best chance of coping with the damage that attacks us. First of all, we can avoid certain kinds of damage altogether, we know for example that tobacco causes damage to our cells, we see this in the increased of heart disease, the increased risk of cancer that comes from smoking.
You can also avoid sunlight that we know damages skin. But there are much more profound things that we now can build into how we try and maintain our bodies through life - nutrition is terribly important, we can avoid foods that damage us, such as fatty foods, and we can seek out foods that we know are good for us. If we think about the things that we put into our body that ultimately will become part of our cellular structure and part of the maintenance system that we have, then we can hope to achieve quite a lot.
We should also think in terms of exercise, exercise is very good for us, it's good for the cardiovascular system, it's good for the general well-being of the muscles and skeleton, but actually there's good evidence that exercise can play a part in slowing down the rates of certain kinds of damage that may contribute to ageing.
There are studies that suggest that the muscles of veteran athletes show a slower build up of mutations in the cellular power units that occur with ageing. We also see that mental exercise, exercise that tests our cognitive performance - things like crossword puzzles, playing card games, learning a new language - provides a mental stimulus.
Things that engage us psychologically are also beneficial, because psychological well-being is important for physical well-being too, it's a way of maintaining our stress hormones in appropriate balance, it's a way of keeping us perhaps better protected against depression, a very common problem that afflicts far too many older people. So, there's a lot that we can do. We have to take responsibility for our bodies, we only get one body in life, we might as well look after it if we want it to reach old age in good shape.
Could you explain how oxidising damages DNA, affecting the ageing process and the process of cancer formation? Oxygen is an extremely important molecule for normal cells to work and to survive. Unfortunately, oxygen has also the ability to transform into aggressive molecules called oxygen free radicals, special kinds of oxygen atoms which have the ability to create molecular damage, so they can interfere with the structure and function of biological molecules such as proteins, RNA and DNA.
DNA is quite special in this regard, because it is the only way a cell can in the long term store biological information and it is present in a low number of copies in each cell, therefore it is very important that cells maintain their DNA in a perfect or almost perfect state of integrity.
Oxiditive damage of DNA means that subtle changes in the structure and in the coding capacity of DNA is introduced, and this molecular damage can lead to mutation of the genetic code, or else it can lead to the situation that genes - specific parts of the DNA - can no longer be transcribed and translated. This explains the intimate relationship between normal ageing and the process of cancer formation. It is well-known that most types of cancers are age-related diseases, and so researchers have speculated a long time ago that there may be common roots for both phenomena.
And actually DNA damage as it is induced by oxidants or by other DNA-damaging compounds, seems to be the driving force of both processes - cancer formation and the ageing process at large. Therefore we firmly believe that if we unravel and understand the molecular mechanisms leading to DNA damage and its repair we will get a good understanding both of the ageing process and of the process of carcenogenesis.
What results have you got so far from your research into DNA damage? The gene we are particularly focussing on in my research group is called Parp 1 and this gene encodes a protein which is one of the tools the cell has in its toolbox to fix and repair genetic damage. Parp1 seems to be the sensor of DNA damage, oxiditive DNA damage for instance, and so we are extremely interested in learning what the role and the function of Parp 1 is, both in the process of ageing and in the process of carcenogenesis.
Research started some years ago found that the longer lived an animal species was, the more proficient this repair tool turned out to be in blood cells we had studied. Very recently we found that Parp 1 is actually a key regulator and modulator of genomic stability. This is a significant discovery because if there's too much genomic instability going on the cell can either die because it will end up in a totally dysfunctional or non-functional state, or else it can be transformed into a malignant tumour cell that has fully maintained the capacity to grow, but has completely escaped any control of its growth.
How can diet affect cell damage and therefore the ageing process? Ageing is clearly a multi-factorial phenomenon, it is controlled both by genetic factors and environmental factors. An important environmental factor is, of course, diet which can modulate the ageing process by contributing beneficial factors, factors that would help maintain and repair any damage that occurred in cells, such as vitamins, which the body cannot synthesise itself, but which the body needs to take up in the diet.
It can also contain damaging factors that add to the problem rather, so, for example, if you have an unhealthy diet that is rich is sugar and saturated fat, it is known that this can increase the burden of cells with regards to oxiditive damage. How is your research beneficial in terms of old people's health?
We hope very much that the work we are doing in basic biogerentology - that is to understand basic molecular mechanisms operating in every cell that lead to the process of ageing - will contribute to an improved quality of life for the elderly. We assume that many ageing associated diseases, like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer and many others, result from deficiencies, perhaps just subtle deficiencies, in the body maintenance and repair functions.
Therefore, if we manage to understand these maintenance and repair functions, if we can detect early on any deficiency in such functions, perhaps in specific organs, then we have a chance for intervention to correct the deficiency if possible, so allowing the individual to live to his or her full potential life span. Professor Anthea Tinker - a social gerontologist, whose research interests include the social issues relating to old age. Professor Tinker believes that the quality of life is at least as important as its quantity.
Important social and economic issues need to be addressed if an increasing elderly population are to lead happy and fulfilling lives. What do elderly people want from current research into ageing? I think the research into ageing and its biological aspects is extremely important. But what most older people want is basic services and of course it's the little things in life that often make such a difference to them.
Research into things like arthritis or incontinence are equally, if not more important - the point is the quality of life. Ten years ago I was in a television show with an audience of about 50 or 60 older people who were asked to put up their hands if they'd like to live to one hundred. Only two people put their hands up - one because she wanted to see a great-grandchild born and the other one just wanted to pay off the mortgage.
What are the implications of increasing the number of older people in society? If we do have many more older people and fewer younger people we have got to have a radical rethink in society. I think the first thing is about employment - many older people would actually like to continue working, perhaps part-time, so I think the idea of people retiring early is probably going to go out of the window, and so we will have more people in paid work. There are also implications for society as well, I think we may tend to value old people and their contribution more- I'm thinking particularly if women are going to go out to work as well as men and therefore grandparents are going to be needed for childcare.
There's also undoubtedly a lot of evidence about age discrimination and prejudice in the health service and in society as a whole, because we are very much a youth dominated culture.
0コメント