Day: 02/04/2013

Testosterone: Can it make you live longer?

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  • Bombarded with adverts promising a longer, healthier life, BBC News Los Angeles correspondent Peter Bowes goes in search of eternal youth.

Dr Jeffry Life, a Las Vegas-based age management doctor, is 74. He has the body of a man half his age. In fact he has a level of muscular definition that many men never achieve.

Genial, soft spoken, bald and lean, Life, who practised family medicine for much of his career, is a poster child for the longevity business.

He was in his late 50s when he realised that as a paunchy middle-aged man, he could drop dead at any time.

“I had really got out of shape, got a lot of body fat and was heading down a disastrous course of diabetes and heart disease,” he says.

Inspired by a muscle magazine that someone left in his examination room, Life decided to get in shape. He started an intensive regime of working out at the gym and within a year transformed his body.

In 1998 he entered a competition, the Body for Life contest, for people who have made dramatic changes to their physique. To his surprise he won first prize in the section for 55-year-olds and older.

“It changed my life and I felt great,” he says.

But as he got older he says he noticed that he was losing ground and finding it more difficult to maintain a lean body. While in his 60s, he visited Las Vegas for a medical conference and was introduced to Cenegenics, an age management company that aspired to make its patients “look and feel years younger”. He went on to become a senior partner.

Life believes that the right kind of exercise and nutrition are important – but correcting hormone deficiencies are the key to his success.

“I got my blood checked and I found that I was profoundly deficient in testosterone,” he says.

He now has weekly injections of the hormone.

“The problem is that when a man’s testosterone gets low they lose their incentive to go to the gym.

“Even if they want to, they dread going to the gym and exercising and it’s a losing battle. Especially abdominal fat around their belly. They spiral out of control.

“A lot of men come to me who are suffering from male-menopause, known as andropause, which creeps into their lives,” he adds.

Andropause, says Life, is characterised by a decline in a man’s sexual function, cognitive ability, an inability to get rid of body fat and fatigue.

He adds: “When I get their testosterone up to a healthy level, it changes everything. They get re-energised, they start seeing body fat disappear and muscle growing.”

Different laboratories vary in what they consider to be a normal testosterone level. According to the Facey Medical Group, a health provider California, the normal reference range is 250 to 1100ng/dl. The Mayo Clinic says testosterone levels drop, within this range, by about 1% a year after the age of 30.

Andropause is not universally accepted by the medical profession as a definable condition for middle-aged and older men, although there has been a huge increase in the number of prescriptions for testosterone in recent years. As well as injections, gels are available and are widely advertised. Last year the British Medical Journal published a studywhich concluded that “many men in the UK are receiving unnecessary testosterone replacement”.

It is an area of medicine that is subject to much debate and often focuses on the question of what is “normal” ageing.

Life argues that the medical profession is too conservative.

“Many doctors get the numbers and then they will tell their patient, ‘Joe, your levels are normal’, when in fact it is within the reference range, but it’s at the bottom of the range. They don’t tell you you’re a D-student,” he says.

Sex hormones – oestrogen in woman and testosterone in men – fulfil many roles in the body. Studies have shown that they are involved in age-related changes, such as the development of dementia.

Testosterone is fantastic,” says Dr Christian Pike, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California, who specialises in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease.

 

“It increases aspects of cognition, it protects the brain from dying, it reduces Alzheimer’s disease, I mean, it’s wonderful,” he says.

But Dr Pike has reservations about the recent trend towards an increased use of sex hormones to reverse the effects of ageing. He says further long-term research is needed to fully understand the way testosterone affects the body.

“It makes me a tad nervous,” he says.

“We know that prostate tumours respond to testosterone with incredible growth.”

Pike says there is promising research focusing on what can be done to turn on the brain’s own testosterone-making system. He says relatively higher levels of testosterone are associated with greater longevity and that people who live longer have better levels of the hormone.

The challenge, he says, is balancing the benefits and the risks.

“So many of the factors that we are looking at are double-edged swords.”

Source:BBC

 

 

 

 

The science of a long life.

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Bombarded with adverts promising a longer, healthier life, BBC News Los Angeles correspondent Peter Bowes goes in search of eternal youth.

If we are lucky, we will grow old. Most of us have grey hair, wrinkles, frailty, loss of memory and degenerative diseases to look forward to – if we do not have them already.

It is not all bad news. With ageing, we can acquire wisdom and often become more emotionally stable and at ease with life. But the downsides seem to far outweigh the perks.

We live in a youth-oriented world.

California epitomises a society where everyone wants to be young, attractive and vibrant. Being old, looking old, acting old is not an option, so much so that after many years operating as the University of California’s Ageing Centre, in Los Angeles, the name was changed to Longevity Center, to “give it a more positive spin,” according to its director, Dr Gary Small.

“Ageism – prejudice against old age – is a tremendous problem,” says Dr Small.

“People need to understand that older people are just people. As soon as you understand that, you can get over that ageism and that fear. Part of it is our own fear of death and of ageing ourselves, so we want to deny that natural process,” he says.

Scientists have long been searching for the key to a long and healthy life and experiments can throw up unlikely results.

 “Start Quote

 

The people who said, ‘I don’t stress, I take it easy, I retire early,’ – those were the people who tended to die at a young age”

Professor Howard Friedman

A stress-free existence is often put forward as recipe for a long life, but a study by Dr Lewis Terman at Stanford University in 1921 refutes many commonly held beliefs about lifestyle and lifespan. It followed the lives of about 1,500 people from childhood to death and set out to match behavioural traits and actual life events with how individuals thrived in later years.

For the past two decades, the research has been updated by Howard Friedman, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside.

“We looked at those people who were the most persistent, most hard-working, most involved, and achieved the most success, and often that was the most stress – those were the people who stayed healthier and lived the longest,” he explains.

“The people who said, ‘I don’t stress, I take it easy, I retire early,’ – those were the people who tended to die at a young age. That was really surprising and it goes against what a lot of advice that we hear.”

According to the study, a little worry is also a good thing. The benefits enjoyed by people who lead a conscientious life were also highlighted.

“They tend to have healthier habits,” he adds.

“They’re less likely to smoke, they’re less likely to drink to excess. But we also found that the people who were conscientious tended to succeed more in their careers, which is a good predictor of health and long life.”

The project also suggests that people who lived a more worthwhile and socially responsible life, helping others, being involved with other people and in their community groups, lived longer.

The saying the good die young does not hold water.

But it is the physical process of ageing that continues to challenge scientists. We are all familiar with the way our bodies change – but the changes that occur at a cellular level are more complex.

“Ageing is not really understood,” says Dr Stephen Coles, lecturer in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA and co-founder of the Gerontology Research Group.

“It is clearly a relationship between the processes that go on when a human being develops, based on our DNA profile, and [those that go on] when the DNA runs out of new things to do, because we’ve achieved the prime directive, which is to go forth and multiply.”

Coles, who studies super centenarians – people who are 110 and over – explains that the decline starts after we turn 30.

“The ageing process takes over in a ruthless way that… attacks all biological organisms.”

 

One area of research into ageing, at a cellular level, focuses on the role of telomeres. They are the protective tips found at the end of chromosomes, sometimes likened to the tips of shoelaces. Their role is to safeguard the end of the chromosome and to prevent the loss of genetic information during cell division.

Telomeres shorten or become damaged every time a cell divides and cell replication stops altogether when telomeres become too short.

Shorter telomeres have been linked with high risks for diseases such as heart disease and dementia.

“Shortened telomeres are clearly bad,” says Coles. “Anything that one can do to lengthen them would be advantageous.”

There are a number of products on the market that claim to lengthen telomeres. Simply put, they could stop cells from ageing, although it has not been established whether this could extend to an anti-ageing effect on the entire body.

But for all the efforts of scientists and psychologists to discover every last secret to living a long life, the maximum age most us can expect to reach is in the late 70s or early 80s.

So what is the best way to die?

“Many geriatricians and gerontologists joke about this,” says Small.

“They say they want to live to be 95 years old and die from a bullet shot from a jealous lover. So the idea is to stay engaged, to stay involved, to enjoy your life, but when your time comes, to accept that and not be afraid of it.”

Source:BBC

 

Australia dolphins ‘saved’ by juvenile’s distress call.

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The distress call of a young dolphin has been used to lure a large pod of the animals to safety, after it appeared they would strand themselves in shallow water.

Environment officials in Western Australia caught the juvenile and took it to deeper water, where its distress calls enticed the rest to follow.

One dolphin died in the incident.

A spotter plane reported that the rest – thought to number about 150 – had swum to the safety of the open sea.

The dolphins had been milling in shallow water at Whalers Cove near the town of Albany, on the south coast of the state.

“The juvenile was sending out distress signals, which was calling the dolphins in,” conservationist Deon Utber told AFP news agency.

“As soon as it was translocated to deeper waters the pod followed it out and last we saw they were swimming out to sea.”

Source:BBC

 

 

Hawksbill turtles’ monogamous sex life revealed.

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The sex lives of critically endangered hawksbill turtles have been revealed by scientists studying the animals in the Seychelles.

Previously, little had been understood about the mating habits of the turtles, which live underwater and often far out at sea.

Researchers were surprised to find that the turtles are mainly monogamous, with females storing sperm from one male and using it to fertilise multiple egg clutches.

The study, led by researchers from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, was published in the online journal Molecular Ecology.

“Sperm storage” is found in animals including reptiles, birds and some turtles, tortoises and terrapins.

Females can store viable sperm from multiple males for long periods of time, meaning that their egg clutches are sometimes fertilised by more than one father.

Researchers carried out DNA testing from hawksbill turtle hatchlings on Cousine Island in the Seychelles to identify how many males were involved in fertilising eggs during a breeding season.

The tests revealed a monogamous mating system: most egg clutches were sired by just one male, and no males had fertilised more than one female during the 75-day season.

“We were surprised that they were so monogamous because actually… genetic monogamy is actually the exception in most animals, not the rule,” said research team member Dr David Richardson.

The findings show that “there are plenty of males out there” for females to mate with.

“It’s very unlikely that it’s just a few males hanging around offshore”, said Dr Richardson. “We think they’re mating with males a long way away, wherever they’re normally foraging and feeding which can be all over the western Indian Ocean,” he added.

The number of hawksbill turtle males contributing to the next generation is important for the species’ survival because it results in higher levels of genetic variation.

Genetic variability “means [the turtles] can respond to new threats, new diseases or anything that comes along,” explained Dr Richardson.

Hawksbill turtles were identified as Critically Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature after years of being hunted for their shells, which were prized in the now illegal decorative tortoiseshell trade.

Found in tropical waters around the world, females turtles gather at onshore nesting sites such as Cousine Island every few years to lay around five clutches of eggs during the season.

Mating often takes place out at sea, but according to the study, by testing DNA samples from hatchlings on the island, the researchers were able to gather information that would have been impossible from observation alone.

Dr Richardson told BBC Nature that this study, combined with independent reports of hawksbill turtle numbers rising, indicates that “in terms of conservation… maybe we are in a better place than we thought.”

The team hopes their study may help conservationists working on Cousine Island to understand more about the lives of the animals and to focus their efforts.

Source:BBC

 

 

Concerns raised over ‘useless’ Arctic oil spill plan.

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Environmental campaigners say that a draft plan to respond to an oil spill in the Arctic ocean is inadequate and vague.

The proposal has been in preparation for two years as oil companies look to increase exploration in the region.

Greenpeace says it fails to get to grip with the risks of an accident in an extremely sensitive location.

Ministers from the eight nation Arctic Council are due to discuss the plan at a meeting in Sweden tomorrow.

As summer ice in the Arctic has declined in recent years, the area has become the subject of intense interest from oil and gas companies.Estimates from the US Geological Survey indicated that there could be 60 billion barrels of oil in the region.

Glaring hole

In 2011 The Arctic Council members signed the Nuuk Declaration that committed them to develop an international agreement on how to respond to oil pollution in the northern seas.

Now Greenpeace have released a draft of the plan that they say is simply inadequate.

“The big glaring hole is that it is such a vaguely worded document that it doesn’t seem to force countries into doing anything,” Ben Ayliffe from Greenpeace told BBC News.

“For all intents and purposes it is a useless document,” he said.

The plan says that “each party shall maintain a national system for responding promptly and effectively to oil pollution incidents” without requiring any clear details on the number of ships or personnel that would be needed to cope with a spillage.

 

Ben Ayliffe says he believes the Arctic Council plan would be ineffective if a spill occurred.

“It would be a nightmare scenario, you’re facing oil drifting for thousands of miles under ice, the technical challenge of operating in darkness would make mounting the sort of response that BP had to do in the Gulf, completely impossible,” he said.

Late last year, the House of Commons environmental audit committee called for a halt to oil drilling in the Arctic until a pan-Arctic response plan was in place. They called for a stricter financial liability regime to require oil and gas companies to prove they could meet the costs of cleaning up a spill.

According to chair of the Committee Joan Walley MP, there were big questions over the abilities of these companies to deal with a spillage.

“The infrastructure to mount a big clean-up operation is simply not in place and conventional oil spill response techniques have not been proven to work in such severe conditions,” she said.

The Arctic Council consists of the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland.

Source: BBC

 

News headlines used to predict future events.

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  • Researchers have developed software which could predict future events such as disease outbreak.

The prototype software uses a combination of archive material from the New York Times and data from other websites, including Wikipedia.

The experts focused on predicting riots, deaths and disease outbreaks and say their accuracy was between 70%-90%.

The work is a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

In their research paper, the two scientists say that using a mixture of archived news reports and real-time data, they were able to see links between droughts and storms in parts of Africa and cholera outbreaks.

For example in 1973 the New York Times published news of a drought in Bangladesh, and in 1974 it reported a cholera epidemic.

Following reports of another drought in the same country in 1983, the newspaper again reported cholera deaths in 1984.

“Alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,” wrote researchers Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, and Kira Radinsky, PhD student at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

While other research has been done in this area, it has tended to be retrospective – looking back at the event leading up to an outbreak – rather than using that data to try to look ahead to the next one, they said.

Ms Radinsky told MIT Technology Review that other useful websites included knowledge bases DBpedia and OpenCyc, and language database Word.

The software could also be used to verify the likelihood of other predictions, according to the research paper.

“It can be valuable to identify situations where there is a significantly lower likelihood of an event than expected by experts based on the large set of observations and feeds being considered in an automated manner,” it said.

“”I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” Mr Horvitz told MIT Technology Review.

“Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.”

Source: BBC

 

‘Steep decline’ in child epilepsy.

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  • _65657552_m1500275-brain_and_brain_waves_in_epilepsy-splThe number of children being diagnosed with epilepsy has dropped dramatically in the UK over the past decade, figures show.

A study of GP-recorded diagnoses show the incidence has fallen by as much as half.

Researchers said fewer children were being misdiagnosed, but there had also been a real decrease in some causes of the condition.

Other European countries and the US had reported similar declines, they added.

Epilepsy is caused when the brain’s normal electrical activity result in seizures.

Data from more than 344,000 children showed that the annual incidence of epilepsy has fallen by 4-9% year on year between 1994 and 2008.

Overall the number of children born between 2003-2005 with epilepsy was 33% lower then those born in 1994-96.

When researchers looked in more detail and included a wider range of possible indicators of an epilepsy diagnosis the incidence dropped by 47%.

Correct diagnosis

Better use of specialist services and increased caution over diagnosing the condition explains some, but not all, of the decline in the condition, the researchers reported in Archives of Diseases in Childhood.

Introduction of vaccines against meningitis and a drop in the number of children with traumatic brain injuries, both of which can cause epilepsy, has probably also contributed to falling cases, they added.

Epilepsy remains one of the most prevalent neurological conditions in children in the UK”

Study author Prof Ruth Gilbert, director of the Centre for Evidence-based Child Health at University College London, said: “The drop is consistent with what has been seen in other countries so it is reassuring that we are seeing the same pattern.

“We’re getting better at diagnosing and deciding who should be treated and then there is also probably an effect of factors like fewer cases of meningitis.”

She said in the past, there was an issue with variable diagnosis and some children being treated who did not need to be.

“There is a more rigorous approach and that is partly down to NICE guidance.

“It is very troubling to have a misdiagnosis because once you have a diagnosis it sticks and that does blight the life of a child.”

Simon Wigglesworth, deputy chief executive at Epilepsy Action, said: “It may indicate a reduction in misdiagnosis rates in children, which we know to be high. However, our discussions with leading clinicians suggest that this may not be the complete picture.

“They tell us that they are not seeing a reduction in the number of children with epilepsy presenting at their clinics and epilepsy remains one of the most prevalent neurological conditions in children in the UK.”

Source: BBC

 

13,000 cancer deaths ‘can be prevented’.

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At least 13,000 premature deaths from cancer could be prevented each year in the UK, says the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF).

It says the government could do more to raise awareness of how people can reduce their cancer risk.

The announcement comes as a survey showed that a third of Britons still believe that developing cancer is due to fate.

About 157,000 people die of cancer every year in the UK.

Although the mortality rate is predicted to continue declining, due to a growing and ageing population the number of deaths is expected to rise to about 182,000 deaths by 2025.

The WCRF survey of more than 2,000 adults suggested that 28% of people think there is little that can be done to prevent cancer.

Cancer myths

But Dr Kate Allen, executive director of science and public affairs at WCRF, said: “These results are a real concern because they show that a significant proportion of people don’t realise that there’s a lot they can do to reduce their risk of cancer.

“By eating healthily, being physically active and keeping to a healthy weight, we estimate that about a third of the most common cancers could be prevented.

“Everyone has a role to play in preventing cancer but governments and health professionals are key to raising awareness and making it easier for individuals to change their lifestyle habits.”

The Union for International Cancer Control, a non-governmental organisation working across 155 countries, estimates that 1.5 million lives could be saved worldwide if urgent action is taken to raise awareness about cancer.

Otherwise, it says, there could be six million premature cancer deaths by 2025.

The UICC and the WCRF want governments and the public to dispel four important myths and misconceptions about cancer, namely that cancer is just a health issue, that it is a disease of the wealthy, developed countries, that it is a death sentence and that getting cancer is down to fate.

Source: BBC

 

 

 

 

 

Fears that music volume limits ‘could be ignored’.

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A safety limit on volume levels which comes into force on all new personal music players this month could be ignored by 40% of young people, says a hearing loss charity.

All personal music players and mobile phones sold in the EU must now have a sound limit of 85 decibels (dB), but users can increase it to 100dB.

Action on Hearing Loss says overexposure to loud music can trigger tinnitus.

Experts say the limit is “good news”.

Tinnitus is a medical term used to describe a ringing or buzzing noise that people can hear permanently in one ear, both ears or in the head.

It is often caused by exposure to loud music and can be accompanied by hearing loss.

Paul Breckell, chief executive of Action on Hearing Loss, said the new EU standard is important because increasing numbers of young people listen to music through a personal music player.

Survey results

“I urge music lovers to consider the long-term risks of overriding the safe setting as overexposure to loud music can trigger tinnitus, and remember that a good pair of noise cancelling headphones can make all the difference.”

A survey of more than 1,500 16 to 34-year-olds by Action on Hearing Loss suggests that 79% of young people are unaware of new standards coming into force this month.

Although 70% of survey respondents said they would take steps to protect themselves against tinnitus, nearly 40% said they would override the new default setting on their music devices.

In October 2008, the European Commission warned that listening to personal music players at a high volume over a sustained period could lead to permanent hearing damage.

As a result, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation (CENELEC) amended its safety standard for personal music players.

Now all personal music players sold in the EU after February 2013 are expected to have a default sound limit of 85dB.

The user can choose to override the limit so that the sound level can be increased up to maximum 100dB. If the user overrides the limit, warnings about the risks must be repeated every 20 hours of listening time.

The European Commission’s assessment said: “Listening to music at 80dB or less is considered safe, no matter for how long or how often personal music players are used. This sound level is roughly equivalent to someone shouting or traffic noise from a nearby road.”

But turning the volume control to 120dB, which is equivalent to an aeroplane taking off nearby, is exceeding safe limits, it said.

The commission said an estimated 20% of young people are exposed to loud sounds during their leisure time – a figure which has tripled since the 1980s.

An estimated 5-10% of of people in the EU are thought to be at risk of permanent hearing loss if exposed to unsafe noise limits for five years or more.

Dr Michael Akeroyd, from the MRC Institute of Hearing Research in Glasgow, said of the new EU standard: “This is good news for the volumes of personal music players. The volumes they can give has been of concern for many years, going back to at least the advent of portable cassette players.”

He added that headphones can vary in quality and design.

“Few designs of headphones remove background sounds, and indeed some designs remove none. But ear-defenders or ear-plugs can remove a substantial amount of noise. Earplug design has advanced greatly in recent years.”

Source: BBC