Is it possible to go against your age

Original author: Anil Ananthaswamy
  • Transfer

There is an amazing relationship between mindset and aging.


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In 1979, psychologist Helen Langer and her students restored the old monastery in the city of Peterborough, New Hampshire, so that it looked transferred from 1959. They invited a group of old men over 70 years old to spend a week in this monastery, and live there as they lived in 1959, "when the IBM computer occupied a whole room, and American women only got acquainted with tights," Langer wrote. Her idea was to bring people back to a time when they were younger and healthier, and see if it would affect them psychologically.

Every day, Langer and students met with subjects to discuss "current" events. They talked about the launch of the first artificial satellite in the United States, the entry of Fidel Castro in Havana and his march through Cuba, and how the Baltimore Colts won the NFL Champions Cup. They discussed “fresh” books: “Goldfinger” by Jan Fleming and “Exodus” by Leon Juris. They watched Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny and Jackie Gleason on the black and white TV, listened to jazz from Nat King Cole on the radio, and watched Marilyn Monroe in the movie “Some Like It Hot”. Everything that happened transferred people to 1959.

When Danger studied the state of people after a week of such sensory and mental immersion in the past, she discovered that their memory, sight, hearing, and physical strength increased. She compared these properties with a control group that spent a week somewhere away. In this case, the control group was told that the experiment was associated with memories. They were not offered to live as if they were in 1959. The first group seemed to be younger by completely objective indicators. The team photographed people before and after the experiment, and people who knew nothing about him claimed that in the later photos the subjects looked younger, says Langer, who works today as a psychology professor at Harvard.



The Langer experiment was an amazing demonstration of how our chronological age, based on the date of birth, doesn’t play the role of an indicator of aging. Langer studied the influence of consciousness on how old we feel and how we behave. After her work, others began to look more objectively at the aging of the body. The goal is to determine the personal “biological age”, trying to designate the physiological development of the body and the deterioration of its condition with age, and to predict the risks of disease and death rather accurately. Scientists, trying to establish the biological age of a person, have learned that organs and tissues often age differently, which makes it difficult to reduce the biological age to a single number. They also made a discovery supporting Langer's work. That how old we feel - our subjective age - can influence how we age. From the point of view of age, leaflets cut off from the calendar are not all.

Intuitively, we know what it means to grow old, but the exact definition of aging was very difficult to give. In 1956, a British gerontologist and author Alex Comfort (known for his book “The Joy of Sex”) defined aging as “a decrease in vitality and an increase in vulnerability”. He wrote that every person dies from "randomly distributed causes." Evolutionary biologists believe that aging reduces our ability to survive and multiply due to "the deterioration of internal physiological qualities." Such deterioration can be considered from the point of view of the work of the cells: the older the cells of the organ, the sooner they will cease to divide and die, or mutations leading to cancer will develop. This leads us to the idea that our bodies can have a true biological age.

The path to determining this age was not easy. One approach is to look for biomarkers of aging, something that changes in the body and can be used as a predictive factor in the acquisition of diseases associated with aging or the remaining lifespan. Obvious biomarkers can be blood pressure or body weight. Both indicators tend to grow with aging. But you can not rely on them. Pressure can change due to medication, and weight depends on lifestyle and diet - there are people who do not get fat during aging.

In the 1990s, one promising biomarker appeared: DNA segments called telomeres. They are located at the end of chromosomes and work like caps that protect chromosomes from wear. Telomeres are often compared to plastic caps at the ends of the laces. It turns out that with each cell division, telomeres become shorter. When they shorten to a certain limit, the cell dies. There is a strong relationship between telomere length, health, and disease, such as cancer and atherosclerosis.

But despite a number of studies looking for this relationship, it is very difficult to prove that telomeres can serve as accurate markers of aging. In 2013, Ann Newman, director of the Center for Aging and Population Health at the University of Pittsburgh, and her student Jason Sanders reviewed existing telomere works and concluded that “if telomere length serves as a human biomarker for aging, it is a weak biomarker with poor predictive accuracy.”

“Twenty years ago, people really hoped that telomere length would be able to explain aging, more precisely, biological aging. It was hoped that this would be the main cause of aging, ”says Steve Horvath, a geneticist and biostatistics from the University of California at Los Angeles. “Now we know that this is not so. Over the past 10-15 years, it has become clear that other mechanisms should play an important role in aging. ”

Attention has shifted to how quickly the body produces stem cells, or the effectiveness of mitochondria (organelles inside cells that produce the energy necessary for their functioning). Horvath sought out reliable markers in the data, for example, by studying the levels of gene expression and their correlation with aging. He found nothing.

This does not mean that there are no reliable biomarkers. Croatian carefully avoided one set of data. We are talking about DNA methylation , the process by which cells turn off genes. Methylation mainly consists in attaching to the cytosine a methyl group , one of the four bases that make up the DNA strand. Since methylation does not change the main genetic sequence, but affects the expression of genes from the outside, this process is called epigenetics .


Steve Horvath

Horvath did not think that epigenetics is related to aging. “I already had all the data, but I didn’t touch them, because I thought they meant nothing,” he says.

But in 2009, Horvath surrendered and analyzed a set of data on the methylation level in 27,000 places of the human genome - this analysis, he said, could be done in an hour. And nothing over the past 10 years of analyzing genetic data sets could prepare it for the result. “I have never seen anything like this before,” he says. “It's a cliché, of course, but it really was irrefutable evidence.”

After several years of “hard work,” Horvath found 353 specific regions of the human genome, represented in the cells of all human tissues and organs. Horvath developed an algorithm that uses methylation levels in these 353 locations — regardless of cell type — to determine epigenetic hours. His algorithm took into account that in some places the methylation levels decreased with age, while in others they increased.

In 2013, Horvath published an analysis of 8,000 samples taken from 51 types of healthy tissues and cells, and the findings were astounding. When he derived one number for a person’s biological age based on weighted average methylation levels in 353 places, he found that this number correlates well with a person’s chronological age (the deviation was less than 3.6 years in 50% of people — much better than any another biomarker). He also found that in middle-aged and older people, the epigenetic clock slows down or accelerates — which makes it possible to determine whether a person is aging faster or slower than a calendar.

Despite the correlation, Horvath says that biological age does not matter for the whole body, but is better applied to certain tissues and organs, be it bones, blood, heart, lungs, muscles, or brain. The difference between biological and chronological ages can be negative, zero or positive. A negative deviation means that the organ or tissue is younger than expected; zero means normal aging; positive means that the tissue or organ is older. The data show that different tissues may age at different speeds.

In general, diseases accelerate epigenetic hours, and this is especially noticeable in patients with Down syndrome and in HIV-infected people. In both cases, tissues age on average faster than usual. For example, blood and brain tissue of HIV-infected people show accelerated aging. Obesity causes the liver to age faster. Studying people who died from Alzheimer's disease shows that their prefrontal cortex was getting older faster. Horvath also analyzed 6,000 cancer samples and found that in these cases the epigenetic clock ticked much faster, indicating that the tissue had aged much more than chronological age.

Despite the abundance of data in our understanding of the surprising correlation between DNA methylation and biological age, there are gaps. “The weakest point of the epigenetic clock is that we do not understand the specific molecular mechanism of their work,” says Horvath. His conjecture is that epigenetic clocks are associated with what he calls the "epigenetic maintenance system", molecular and enzymatic processes that support epigenes and protect them from damage. “It seems to me that these markers are traces of the activity of this mechanism,” says Horvath. But “why is it so accurate? What is connected with his work? This is now the biggest problem, ”he adds.

And even without understanding the exact principles of the operation of epigenetic clocks, they can be used as a tool to measure the effectiveness of anti-aging measures, potentially capable of slowing down aging. “I would be very interested to develop a therapy that allows you to restart the epigenetic clock,” says Horvath.

Horvath reflects on hormone therapy, and the work of Langer with old men in the monastery indicates that the power of consciousness can affect the body. Langer did not publish the results of her work in a scientific journal in 1979. At that time she did not have the resources to thoroughly prepare for publication in leading journals. “Running an experiment that lasts five days makes it very difficult to control everything,” says Langer. - And I did not have funding, for example, in order to provide a control group with a weekend. I could have published in a less well-known journal, but there was no point in this. I just wanted to release the information to the world, so first I wrote it in a book for the Oxford University Press. ”

In addition, her evidence for the unity of mind and body was perhaps too radical for magazines. “I think they would not accept the theoretical part of the work,” she says. “The received data, the improvement of the sight and hearing of the old people were such strange information that they would not hasten to publish it in order not to stand out.” Since then, Langer has conducted many studies on the relationship of body and mind and the effect of this connection on physiology and aging, which have been published in various journals and books.

Traditionally, the problem of the body and mind relates to the fact that it is difficult to explain exactly how our intangible state of consciousness affects the material body (and such effects are well known, for example, as in the case of placebo). Langer believes body and mind are one. “As your mind is tuned, so is your body,” she says.

So Langer began to find out whether a state of mind can influence such objective things as blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. The 46 subjects in her experiment with type 2 diabetes were supposed to play computer games for 90 minutes. They had a clock on the table. They were asked to change games every 15 minutes. The trick was that the watches were slower than usual for the test subjects, faster for the other third, and for the last third the watches went at a normal speed.

“We wondered if the change in glucose level would depend on real time or on perceived,” says Langer. - It turned out that from the perceived. It was a vivid illustration of the influence of psychological processes - in this case, the subjective perception of time - on the body’s metabolism, which controls glucose levels.

Although Langer did not study the connection of mind and body in epigenetics, other studies suggest that a connection may exist. In 2013, Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with his colleagues, said that even one day of meditation can influence gene expression. In their study, 19 experienced meditators were examined before and after a day of intense meditation. The control group consisted of 21 people, all day indulged in rest. As a result, meditating people found a lower level of activity of genes responsible for inflammation - this is the effect observed when taking anti-inflammatory drugs. A decrease in the activity of genes associated with epigenetic control of the expression of other genes was also detected. It turns out that the state of consciousness affects epigenetics.

Such studies, together, suggest why the week-long vacation in New Hampshire reversed the age-related features of the elderly. Their minds went to a time when they were young, and therefore their bodies also went backwards in time, which caused physiological changes that resulted in improved vision and hearing.

It is important, however, to note that the aging process cannot be stopped - and at some point no positive thinking can cope with age. If body and mind are one, then in the aging body the mind also grows old, which limits our ability to influence physiological aging with the help of psychology.

But Langer still believes that the way we age depends on how we perceive aging - and this is often reinforced by the influence of culture and society. “Take aging or something else — if you are surrounded by people who are expecting something specific from you, you are seeking to meet those expectations, whether they are positive or negative,” says Langer.

Most of us are slaves of our chronological age, and behave, as they say, according to age. For example, young people take the steps necessary to recover from a small injury, while people in their 80s can simply accept the pain and do nothing to solve the problem. “Many people based on social expectations often say:“ Well, what did you want, with age you fall apart, ”says Langer. “And they do nothing to improve the situation, and the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Psychologist and gerontologist Antonio Terraciano from the University of Florida Medical College is interested in perceived or subjective age. The work of Horvat shows that biological age correlates with diseases. Can this be said about subjective age?

The feeling of people of their own age can vary greatly from person to person. People aged 40 to 80 feel younger. People at the age of 60 can say that they feel at 50 or 55, and sometimes at 45. Few people say that they feel older. But people over the age of 20 usually feel their chronological age equal, and sometimes they say they feel a little older.

Terraciano and his colleagues discovered that subjective age correlates with certain psychological markers of aging — for example, such as grip strength, walking speed, lung volume, and even C-reactive protein levels.in the blood - a sign of inflammatory processes. The younger you feel, the better you have these indicators of age and health: you walk faster, you can squeeze your hand stronger, you have more lung volume and less inflammation.

Subjective age affects cognitive abilities and serves as an indicator of the likelihood of dementia. Terraciano and colleagues studied the data collected on 5748 people aged over 65 years. To obtain a starting point, scientists measured the cognitive abilities of the subjects, and then monitored their condition for four years. Participants were periodically asked how old they feel. The researchers found that those whose subjective age was initially greater were more likely to have cognitive problems and even dementia.

But these studies with correlations have limitations. It is possible, for example, that physically active people who walk faster and whose lungs are more feel younger naturally. How to determine whether subjective age affects the physiology, or vice versa?

That is what Janic Stefan and his colleagues at the University of Grenoble tried to find out. They attracted to the experiment 49 adults aged 52 to 91 years, and divided them into experimental and control groups. Everyone was first asked about their subjective age - how much they feel, unlike chronological age - and measured the strength of the grip to determine the basic level. Then each member of the experimental group was told that his results were better than the results of 80% of all other participants. In the control group did not say anything. After such a manipulation, both groups checked again - they measured the strength of the grip and asked the subjective age. On average, the subjective age of members of the experimental group turned out to be less than the base level. And in the control group, no changes were observed.

These correlations do not necessarily mean that people who feel younger have better health. The next step for Terraciano will be to correlate subjective age with numerical biological indicators of age. And although there have not yet been studies that have found a link between new epigenetic markers and subjective age, Terraciano is in a hurry to find out if there is a strong correlation between them.

However, it turns out that our chronological age is just a number. “If people think that because of their age, they cannot do something, or they cut off social ties, or take a negative way of thinking that limits their lives, this can adversely affect them,” says Terraciano. “And if you deal with a negative approach, set yourself challenges, keep your mind open, be socially active, the effect will be definitely positive.”

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