8 ms·
Longevity Linked to Proteins That Calm Overexcited Neurons
- Razengan 7y agoCould this be related to the generally shorter lifespans of males?
- lesservehicle 7y agoThis ain’t it, chief
- alexis_fr 7y agoLife expectancy was the same for both genders in 1900 (in Europe at least). We’ve just made continually more progress for women than for men. Nowadays for example: lots of research on female cancer (twice more funding than male cancers, for the same incidence and mortality) and domestic violence, little budgets on suicide. Lots of money for equality at work where women are fewer, little money for boys massively dropping at school. Practically no help if you are a man facing a male-specific issue, which is why a lot of them engage in the army or in Daesh (depending which side they tilt towards), and practically all killers you know are boys victims of harassment, absent father syndrome and on the spectrum of autism, with no help from the social fabric. Men live shorter not because it is nature, but because we’ve made less progress for them.
- Coxa 7y agoDo you have a citation for the formerly same life expectancy in men and women. I cannot find any.
- ALittleLight 7y agoHistorically women likely had to deal with high death in child birth rates.
- leereeves 7y agoAccording to the UK government [1] there's been a gap back to at least the 1850s, which was growing worse until 1970, and has since been getting better, but remains considerably higher than in 1850. 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09#notes https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- adventured 7y agoThere are some interesting challenges to your premise, even though some of it very clearly plays a role in the gap. There is a six year gap (81 vs 87 as of 2018-2019) between men and women in Japan. Arguably none of that gap is properly explained by the issues you've raised. The Japanese are the healthiest, longest living people of any large cohort on the planet and yet the gap persists. Further, roughly twice as many girls (50.5%) born in 2019 in Japan will live to 90 as boys (26.5%). None of that is explained by things like rates of cancer (low in Japan), school drop-out rates, domestic violence, murder rates, prison, crime, work equality, army / Daesh matters, or suicide rates. Japan's male suicide rate for example is below that of the US, Finland and only a few points above France. Yet the life expectancy gap between men and women is smaller in the US than in Japan, which makes little sense if your raised issues were the leading cause agents.
- ekianjo 7y ago> None of that is explained by things like rates of cancer (low in Japan), ??? Not for Stomach cancer or CRC. CRC: High in Japan vs most other countries, and significantly more prevalent with men: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/colorectal-cancer-statistics https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/colorectal-... Stomach: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/stomach-cancer-statistics https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/stomach-can... men get is almost 3x more than women in Japan and Japan is the top 3 worldwide in incidence. And overall death rates by cancer for men in Japan are quite a lot higher than for females: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4929724/figure/Fig2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4929724/figure/... For suicides in Japan it's predominantly men who commit suicide, with a ratio of 2.53 vs female: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... Before making blanket statements you may want to check the data...
- keenmaster 7y agoThere’s a theory that longevity is lower in men because they need to be stronger in order to survive in a conflict. It’s a trade off. Physical strength is the result of growth, but some of the same pathways for increased growth are also theorized to be the root cause of aging. Note that this is independent of strength training; it’s the ability to get stronger, rather than actually getting stronger (among other related characteristics), that may affect longevity. Your intuition that accidental death and smoking do not explain the entirety of the gender gap in longevity is spot on. It’s not all bad news for men though. If you manage to avoid obesity and diabetes, your increased strength and bone density may impart greater quality of life in old age, and that may be worth the 3 lost years at the end of life. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3034172/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3034172/
- huntertwo 7y agoThis seems like it could be true, but is against my intuition. It could be that in 1900 things that killed people killed them before brain activity was significant to have an effect. But as health results improved, brain activity ended up being a bigger factor on when someone died because they weren't busy dying from typhoid 25 years prior. I'm personally of the hypothesis that in most cultures men undertake activities that end up killing them earlier in aggregate than women.
- coldtea 7y ago>Life expectancy was the same for both genders in 1900 (in Europe at least). Probably because other factors that would kill early both men and women much sooner dominated. Like trying to measure the performance of a program when the disk is too slow and ending up measuring the disk...
- tasty_freeze 7y agoYou are driving a thesis here but using only data which supports that thesis. There are many other reasons why, at least in the culture I'm familiar with (the USA) men have tended to live shorter. These are all stated in past tense, though many are still true today: - men smoked at higher rates than women - men were more likely to drink heavily - men were more likely to engage in dangerous work (construction vs nursing) - men were more likely to drive aggressively and/or drive motorcycles - men were far more likely to say "watch this!" and do something like, oh, jumping off the roof of a house an into a pool
- bitL 7y agoExploration vs exploitation at work. Teenage men are way more biased towards exploration, whether it's good or bad. Sometimes some of them figure out something great that improves civilization. Without that risk taking we all would be dead or in zombie mode.
- belorn 7y agoLets take this from a perspective of stress. Stress is highly correlated with life length, with those who has good stress management having longer lifer. What is good stress management? Among other things good social support. Bad stress management is things like substance abuse. So why do men have worse social support than women? First we can look at is how society reward men who focus their time on social networking compared to a focus on career and higher income. On average, how do society react if a man choose a high social job such as nursing vs a high income job such as construction, and then compare that average for women. The second thing we can look at is a more obvious one. On average men are more likely to be childless than women. It should surprise no one that having one or more children does increase the probability of a social support network at old age. The third thing is suicide which is the single largest cause of death for men until age of 65 (if I remember right). Suicide is highly correlated with untreated depression, a illness where it is well know that men is in the receive end of discrimination. Very few culture has any tolerance for men with mental illness, and this again is correlated to social support and in the long run stress management. Men with mental illness run higher risk of handling it alone compared to women. It should be noted here that for the age groups where "drive aggressively and/or drive motorcycles" is relevant, suicide is still more common cause of death. I will also include the age groups of people who say "watch this".
- juliendorra 7y agoI know that your points are standard masculinist talking points and I most probably won’t change your perspective. As I understand it, you seem to point the blame for men relatively shorter lifespan (which in fact have consistently grow over the last decades in OCDE countries, except in the US) toward “more attention to women’s issues”. Of course every single bit of attention to women’s issues have been a very long hard fight (for example thousands of women were dying each year of illegal abortion, for decades and centuries… that was not an easy fight to get this fixed, because men in charge couldn’t care less.) But, hey, here’s are four points —in addition to the statistics others have pointed out— that paint a different picture than the “men have been abandoned” framing: - Young men takes more risks and die more frequently of violent death (road accident for example, or alcool related accident in general). That’s a social posture that feminism is actively trying to change but strangely this is cherished by many men, who think changing the male culture is somehow bad for them. If we want young men to die less, let’s raise them as girls (I’m 100% serious). If you actively refuse to raise boys with girly values like care and empathy and being reasonable, then you are actively encouraging young men to risk their life in various stupid ways. - Women health have been second to men health in many domains since a very long time. One reason has been under diagnosis (ex: cardiac issues used to be under diagnosed for women, might still be the case). Women are under diagnosed because doctors tend to think they are exaggerating their symptoms. This have been document by medical studies, for example in Canada, where they had relatively to the number of cases more death of cardiac complications for women than for men. - You are right that more boys drop out of school. Again, several gender issues researchers have pointed that trend back in the 80s or 90s. I believe feminists were the first to alert on that trend (in any case, I first read about it in feminist publications). Yet, incredibly, men overall have a bigger share of total wages and occupy the top management seat and most of gouvernement seats in OCDE. Go figure! Maybe men are favorited after all? - Back to medical research. Did you know that female subjects have been traditionally excluded from medical research when creating test group? It is called the medical gender gap, and has been documented and, of course, people have been trying actively to reverse it since the 90s because it is harmful for women. Sorry if these 4 points might seem disjointed. But if you want to learn more, they might be a start for you. Dig and read feminist research.
- 7y ago
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN threads into gender flamewar. Last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Icedcool 7y agoSad facts.
- ghostcluster 7y ago> In their new study, Yankner and his colleagues report that the brains of long-lived humans have unusually low levels of proteins involved in excitation, at least in comparison with the brains of people who died much younger. This finding suggests that the exceptionally old people probably had less neural firing. To investigate this association in more detail, Yankner’s team turned to C. elegans. They compared neural activity in the splendidly long-lived daf-2 mutants with that of normal worms and saw that firing levels in the daf-2 animals were indeed very different. > “They were almost silent. They had very low neural activity compared to normal worms,” Yankner said, noting that neural activity usually increases with age in worms. “This was very interesting, and sort of parallels the gene expression pattern we saw in the extremely old humans.” Does the low neural activity correlate with a less active experience of the world? Are you experiencing your state with the mute button on? I'm no neurosurgeon, but if this is the trade-off, perhaps living longer by using this REST gene might result in a less rich, dynamic, and textured experience? Might it mean living a life like this is less 'fun'?
- agumonkey 7y agoDepends on the nature of activity. Pure stress will activate your brain but experience is mostly degraded.
- daeroth 7y agoWhat if stressful existance pushes for shorter lifespan with the effect of quickening the turnover of generations. So stressful environment would speed up the evolutionary iteration of generations. While less stressful existance that has adopted to the environment would persist longer.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoThis analogy happens in some animals for sure. At the zoo they place the antelope near the cheetahs so that they breed more.
- YokoZar 7y ago
- hourislate 7y ago> The results may help explain the observation that some drugs used for epilepsy extend life span in lab animals. It would be interesting to find out if CBD (seizure control, calming effect) might be beneficial in increasing levels of REST and calming neural activity.
- pelasaco 7y agothat's was the first thing that I thought.. Together with Sex.
- rpmisms 7y agoDoes this relate in any way to the anti-aging drug cocktail that we saw a few months ago? IIRC that one related to genetic aging markers, and stress can affect mitosis. It seems like immortality has a lot of building blocks, and the research isn't far enough to combine them yet.
- redsymbol 7y agoAnyone have a link to that? Sounds interesting.
- Icedcool 7y agoI’d like to read as well.
- keenmaster 7y agoYou should watch Joe Rogan speak with David Sinclair, who researches aging at Harvard, about the latest developments in his field https://youtu.be/ZGLL77wYxe8 https://youtu.be/ZGLL77wYxe8 Aside from multivitamins and idiosyncratic drugs, Sinclair takes the following supplements every day: - Resveratrol – 1g in the morning (this is synergistic with NMN) - Nicotinamide Mononucleotide (NMN) – 1g in the morning - Metformin (prescription drug) – 1g in the evening – except on days when exercising, since metformin reduces muscle growth after exercising (As an aside, he also engages in intermittent fasting, to reduce his total feeding hours. There’s a theory that intermittent fasting triggers a beneficial stress response whereby your body becomes more “efficient” in a way that prolongs life. Intermittent fasting has been shown to prolong lifespan in mice. Interestingly, resveratrol is expressed in plants as a defense mechanism akin to what intermittent fasting does in humans, and that’s one of the supplements that Sinclair recommends.) Sinclair is very careful not to recommend that cocktail for anyone, since anti-aging research is still very preliminary. The relevant human trials are underway. However, NMN in particular has had astonishing effects on mice. Mice that took NMN lived significantly longer than other mice. Old mice that took it ran for so long that the measuring device on their running wheel timed out, because they weren’t expected to ever run that long. In old age, the NMN mice were conspicuously stronger, had more hair, saw better, and were more mentally intact. In short, NMN might reverse the underlying epigenetic causes of aging. Sinclair subscribes to the information theory of aging, where, over time, your epigenome accumulates damage and errors, and protective mechanisms die out. It’s like scratches on an overplayed analog vinyl disc which slowly declines in function and eventually stops playing altogether. You lose a majority of your NAD+ as you get older (NAD+ is fed by NMN), which is problematic because NAD+ feeds biological mechanisms which mitigate informational damage. That’s why supplementing with NMN is theorized to have anti-aging effects. Sinclair wrote a great book synthesizing aging research if you want to read more about it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501191977/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdo_CG04DbR0WP5WS https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501191977/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdo_...
- asah 7y agoYay! Responsible journalism that includes debunks of obvious theories. More like this, please.
- copperx 7y agoIs this the norm for Quanta Magazine? If so, I'll subscribe.
- hbarka 7y agoI’m suspicious of the bacronym REST. Was it created to push the idea? I’d rather they coined a neutral acronym. This one reeks of marketing.
- LegitShady 7y agoEveryone knows you come up with the cool acronym first and then figure out what the letters mean to fit the cool acronym.
- windsignaling 7y agoThat's a rather strong accusation... In the article it says REST was studied previously in contexts that have nothing to do with aging.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoI'm sure it wasn't an accident, but I think it was just meant to be a convenient association with it having an inhibitory effect. At least it's not as overloaded as SAD.
- allovernow 7y agoPurely speculating, but perhaps this would place a positive evolutionary pressure on migraines, since they are associated with cortical spreading depression[1] which globally decreases neuronal activity for up to days at a time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hotdogsgto 7y agoSo...we're never going to not die?!?!
- 2Xheadpalm 7y ago“The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.” ― Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching
- lookACamel 7y agoPretty sure that's from Blade Runner not Dao De Jing.
- loco5niner 7y agoWhy not both?