http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5170228/ "...After age 40, they found, about 400 genes showed significant changes in how hard they had been working while the person was alive to instruct cells to make certain proteins. Many of those genes were damaged and could not function properly. ‘This gives us a starting point because what we’ve shown is that there’s a genetic signature, so to speak, of this aging process and now we can work to determine how that impacts brain function,’ says Bruce A. Yanker, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. "Slightly less than half of the 400 or so genes — including those involved in learning, memory and communication between brain cells — were found to be functioning at a lower level, perhaps because of some kind of damage, the researchers found. The remaining genes were found to be working harder after age 40. They included genes involved in DNA repair, antioxidant defense and stress and inflammatory responses. Overall, the findings suggest that the first set of genes had sustained damage that hampered their functioning, and the other genes were working harder to try to lessen or repair that damage..."
Mitochondrial DNA damage with aging: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5068186/ "...Researchers describe the study as the first experimental evidence of this theory — at least in laboratory mice. They believe the finding could explain how humans age and how the body’s systems begin to misfire, although more tests must bear out them out...In the experiments, the Swedish team used mice bred with a defective version of an enzyme responsible for maintaining mitochondrial DNA...“It seems to be a universal phenomenon in mammals that you have this damage to mitochondrial DNA as you get older,” said the study’s senior author, Nils-Goran Larsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “But I and many others thought this was just a secondary phenomenon,” Larsson said. “I think the importance of our paper is that we actually show these mutations can indeed cause several changes associated with aging...” "...“But that does not mean all aging is caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA,” said David Finkelstein of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health...In an accompanying commentary in Nature, George Martin and Lawrence Loeb of the University of Washington said the results are also consistent with the theory that so-called “free radicals” play a role in aging..." An abstract on aging and mitochondrial genes, with links to definitions and the Aging Research Centre - more technical. http://www.arclab.org/medlineupdates/abstract_8706795.html There are many technical articles about aging accessible from the homepage of this site. A non-technical site is: http://www.infoaging.org/index.html (sponsored in part by Pfizer) Debbi who apparently _is_ cresting the hill, at least according to the first article... :P __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
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