Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Longer Life Span?

In an artist's image of DNA, a person's glowing hand hold a strand of genetic material.     Nobody wants to die, living a longer life is a goal that most people have. People have tried many many things to try to live a longer life, with not much success. Dr. Ajit, a researcher at the University of California may be on to something. His research has uncovered a gene that may be linked to a longer lifespan. This gene (CD33rSIGLEC) is involved anti inflammation. Dr Ajit's research as proven that mice with less copies of this gene show signs of early aging and death. This research is the first of its kind that links a specific gene to living longer, although this is still the beginning of  this research it is looking promising.


     Inflammation is a natural process of the bodies immune system, it is completely normal for the body to respond to infection or tissue damage with swelling. However, chronic inflammation can be a hazard to the body, such  as arthritis, or celiac disease. Having inflammation for long periods of time can destroy tissues and cause premature aging. With this information it makes sense that having a gene that codes against inflammation would cause you to live longer. The issue that arose in this research is that they have yet to find out if this gene is linked to a longer life, or if mammals would develop more of this gene because they were living longer. There is still research to be done on this topic but I believe that these scientists are on the right track.


Article: A Longer Life May Lie in Number of Anti-Inflammatory Genes
Article 2: More Anti-inflammatory Genes Mean Longer Lifespans for Mammals

3 comments:

  1. This is an interesting topic, there are other issues that could arise from having a longer life span. Overpopulation is already a big problem, having people live longer would most likely take a huge hit to everyone's quality of life.

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  2. This is an interesting topic, there are other issues that could arise from having a longer life span. Overpopulation is already a big problem, having people live longer would most likely take a huge hit to everyone's quality of life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is certainly an interesting study. Inflammation in excess can be highly damaging and cause many issues that may lead to an early death. If this gene turns out to be able to control inflammation levels it would be of great use to the medical community.

    ReplyDelete