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Tag: Frailty

Frail woman
A research paper published in Aging explored a link between breast cancer, hematopoietic cell transplants (HCTs), an increase in physical frailty, and cellular senescence. Treatment comes at a cost HCTs and breast cancer treatment are lifesaving procedures. However, chemotherapy in breast cancer sharply increases p16INK4a, a key biomarker of cellular senescence [1], and HCTs are...
Hitting the brakes
Scientists have found that older people currently retain more youthful abilities than people who were the same age did in previous decades [1]. How miserable are we? Recent decades have seen leaps in average life expectancy. However, those mostly stem from successes in curbing childhood mortality and infectious diseases. The gains in later life have...
Elderly clinical trial
A placebo-controlled Phase 1/2 trial conducted in East Shanghai has found that administering umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells reduces frailty in older people. Stem cells against frailty These researchers begin by defining frailty as "a state of heightened vulnerability to potential stressors as a consequence of reduction in physiological reserves across multiple systems" [1]. This...
Buff old man
A study published in Aging Cell has reported that older people with better regulated autophagy in their skeletal muscles have less age-related frailty. Taking out the trash What is Autophagy?Autophagy, derived from ancient Greek, means "eating of self". Autophagy is the way cells break down misbehaving or nonfunctional organelles and proteins in the cell. This...
Wheelchair exercise
Today in GeroScience, researchers have published an analysis of a cohort study, concluding that adherence to physical activity recommendations can mitigate the increased mortality associated with disability. Simply being able to live In this paper, disability refers to impediments to the basic activities of daily living (ADLs), such as moving, dressing, showering, and eating. Disability...
Ancient clock
An accepted manuscript in the Journals of Gerontology has described how a third-generation epigenetic clock is a predictor  of future frailty. Are epigenetic and physiological metrics connected? This paper begins with an examination of two different methods of measuring aging processes. The first is the well-known epigenetic clocks, and this paper lists several, including the...