Kronos-Longevity-Research-Institute

Update: Is Grey the New Gold?

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Here you have the June edi­tion of our month­ly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and Brain Fitnessbrain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, using the box at the top of this page.

The full sched­ule of the Sharp­Brains’ pow­ered Cog­ni­tive Health Track at the Games for Health Con­fer­ence, June 11–12th in Boston, is now avail­able online. 13 ses­sions will fea­ture 18 inno­va­tors and thought-lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing devel­op­ers, uni­ver­si­ties, clin­i­cians, con­sumers, insur­ance com­pa­nies, and more. You can learn more and reg­is­ter.

Longevi­ty Dividend

Ever heard of the Longevi­ty Div­i­dend? Per­haps Grey is the New Gold: The Kro­nos Longevi­ty Research Insti­tute has released a new report sum­ma­riz­ing the state of aging research that includes an excel­lent intro­duc­tion into the Longevi­ty Div­i­dend, a “the­o­ry that says we hope to inter­vene sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly to slow the aging process, which will also delay the onset of age-relat­ed dis­eases. Delay­ing aging just sev­en years would slash rates of con­di­tions like can­cer, dia­betes, Alzheimer’s dis­ease and heart dis­ease in half.” With that con­text in mind, is the Nation­al Insti­tute on Aging get­ting its fair bud­get share?

Resources

Visu­al Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the State of the Mar­ket 2009: Paul Van Slem­brouck sum­ma­rizes and beau­ti­ful­ly presents the main find­ings of our 150-page mar­ket report, The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket 2009. Enjoy this excel­lent graph­ic.

Book Club Dis­cus­sion Guide: The goal of our just pub­lished book, The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, is to inform you, but also to open a much need­ed debate to con­tribute to our col­lec­tive brain fit­ness. We encour­age book clubs to read and dis­cuss the book, and sug­gest 10 ques­tions to kick­start the con­ver­sa­tion. Please do send us your answers and impressions!

Edu­ca­tion & Learning 

10% Stu­dents may have work­ing mem­o­ry prob­lems: Why does this mat­ter?: A recent study screened over 3,000 school-aged stu­dents in schools in the UK and found that 1 in 10 was iden­ti­fied as hav­ing work­ing mem­o­ry dif­fi­cul­ties. Work­ing mem­o­ry is our abil­i­ty to store and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion for a brief time, and dif­fi­cul­ties in this brain func­tion may lead into dif­fi­cul­ties in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics. Dr. Tra­cy Alloway reviews the study and elaborates.

Brain Sci­en­tists Iden­ti­fy Links between Arts & Learn­ing: Nicky Pen­til­la com­ments on a recent report spon­sored by the Dana Foun­da­tion and a relat­ed Learn­ing, Arts, and the Brain Sum­mit. “Arts edu­ca­tion influ­ences learn­ing and oth­er areas of cog­ni­tion and may deserve a more promi­nent place in schools.” Of par­tic­u­lar note is the find­ing that showed sig­nif­i­cant brain plas­tic­i­ty as a result of instru­men­tal music instruc­tion are repeat­ed practice.

8 Tips To Remem­ber What You Read: Despite tele­vi­sion, cell phones, and  twit­ter, tra­di­tion­al read­ing is still an impor­tant skill. Dr. Bill Klemm offers some tips to read with good speed and com­pre­hen­sion: Read with a pur­pose, Skim first, Get the read­ing mechan­ics right, Be judi­cious in high­light­ing and note tak­ing, Think in pic­tures, Rehearse as you go along, Stay with­in your atten­tion span and work to increase your atten­tion span, Practice.

News

Cor­po­rate Well­ness, Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments and Mem­o­ry Fit­ness Pro­grams: a great Mar­ket­Watch arti­cle pro­vides an overview of how major insur­ers and large employ­ers are start­ing to add brain health to their cor­po­rate well­ness activ­i­ties.  The Stan­ford Longevi­ty Cen­ter released a state­ment urg­ing con­sumers who buy a range of mem­o­ry prod­ucts to make informed deci­sions (we released the book above pre­cise­ly with that goal in mind).

Have a stim­u­lat­ing month of June!

Ever heard of the Longevity Dividend? Perhaps Gray is the New Gold

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The Longevi­ty Div­i­dend is a the­o­ry that says we hope to inter­vene sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly to slow the aging process, which will also delay the onset of age-relat­ed dis­eases. Delay­ing aging just sev­en years would slash rates of con­di­tions like can­cer, dia­betes, Alzheimer’s dis­ease and heart dis­ease in half. That’s the longevi­ty part.

The div­i­dend comes from the social, eco­nom­ic, and health bonus­es that would then be avail­able to spend on schools, ener­gy, jobs, infra­struc­ture tril­lions of dol­lars that today we spend on health­care ser­vices. In fact, at the rate we’re going, by the year 2020 one out of every $5 spent in this coun­try will be spent on health­care. Obvi­ous­ly, some­thing has to change.

Enter the Longevi­ty Div­i­dend. The Longevi­ty Div­i­dend does­n’t sug­gest that we live longer; instead, it calls for liv­ing bet­ter. The idea is that if we use sci­ence to increase healthspan, not lifes­pan. In oth­er words, tomor­rows 50-year-old would have the health pro­file of a 43-year-old.

It might sound like sci­ence fic­tion, but, in fact, it’s quite pos­si­ble. We’re already doing it in some ani­mal mod­els using genet­ic and dietary inter­ven­tions, tech­niques relat­ed to what sci­en­tists call “the biol­o­gy of aging.”

Get­ting there in humans, how­ev­er, means embrac­ing an entire­ly new approach to our think­ing about dis­ease and aging, and how we con­duct sci­en­tif­ic research into the two.

Get­ting Sci­en­tists’ Attention 

A group of emi­nent researchers first pro­posed the Longevi­ty Div­i­dend in a 2006 arti­cle pub­lished in The Sci­en­tist. The authors, S. Jay Olshan­sky, PhD, pro­fes­sor of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and bio­sta­t­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois in Chica­go, Daniel P. Per­ry, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Alliance for Aging Research in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Richard A. Miller, MD, PhD, pro­fes­sor of pathol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan in Ann Arbor, and Robert N. But­ler, MD, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Inter­na­tion­al Longevi­ty Cen­ter in New York, intend­ed their essay to be a “gen­er­al state­ment to sci­en­tists about the need for a par­a­digm shift in the way we think about aging and disease.

The researchers also met with U.S. sen­a­tors who served on the Sen­ate com­mit­tee that over­saw the bud­get for the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health (NIH). “We told them we believed [Read more…] about Ever heard of the Longevi­ty Div­i­dend? Per­haps Gray is the New Gold