Featured series 
Tag: Aging
-
Health
Finding the start of Alzheimer’s disease
Faces are hard to remember. Even harder are the names that go with them. It’s one of the most common problems people face as they get older.
-
Campus & Community
MIND recognizes Cure Alzheimer’s Fund with first philanthropic award
Established in 2001 by members of the Harvard Medical School faculty, the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND) recently recognized the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund with its first Philanthropic Innovation and Investment Award. The award recognizes donors who have made substantial commitments to visionary work that cannot be funded through other sources but has the potential…
-
Health
Cocoa shows promise as next wonder drug
A big problem facing Americans and Europeans is the dangerous rise in blood pressure with age, increasing their risk of heart disease and diabetes. Kuna Indians living off the Caribbean coast of Panama don’t have that problem. Norman Hollenberg, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, is convinced that it’s because they drink more…
-
Health
New findings may increase longevity of stem cells
Identifying the mechanisms that control cell life span is one of the more important questions facing stem cell researchers, indeed, all researchers attempting to understand normal and abnormal cell and organ development. So the recent discovery by a Harvard Stem Cell Institute team that a family of well-known transcription factors plays a major role in…
-
Health
HSCI/MGH researchers identify gene product involved in stem cell aging and death
A multi-institutional team of Harvard researchers may have advanced our understanding of physiological aging with a new study in which they greatly reduced the impact of aging on blood stem cells. A report on their findings appears in the latest edition of the journal Nature along with similar but independent findings from research teams at…
-
Health
Heat waves deadliest for blacks, diabetics
Heat waves, like the one that scorched the country in July, are more deadly for some people than for others. Poor blacks and diabetics fare the worst. As you might guess, extreme heat is also hard on the elderly. But as you might not guess, extreme cold has a greater impact.
-
Health
Meditation found to increase brain size
People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention…
-
Health
Largest twin study of age-related macular degeneration finds genetics and environment play large role in disease
Researchers led by Johanna M. Seddon, M.D., at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health conducted the largest study of twins of…
-
Health
Adding years to your life
A research team did the first global study of the potential increase in life expectancy if 20 well-known risk factors could be eliminated or reduced to safer levels. These factors…
-
Health
Eating less and living longer
Tantalizing evidence exists that cutting calories by 20 percent helps monkeys, who are close relatives, to live longer, healthier lives. And, in one nonscientific program, adults are reducing their caloric…
-
Health
Incidence of hip fractures reduced by walking
In the United States, one in every three adults 65 years old or older falls each year, with hip fractures resulting in the greatest number of deaths and most serious…
-
Health
Researchers eye earliest triggers of age-related macular degeneration
Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness for Americans over 60 years of age. It affects more than 14 million people. But how it attacks the macula, the…
-
Health
Harvard scientists identify chromosome location of genes associated with long life
Scientists have long thought of aging as a complex process affected by perhaps a thousand genes. So a recent discovery by Harvard scientists that a gene or genes located on…
-
Health
Growth factor seen to reverse loss of muscle from aging, disease
Previous work by Nadia Rosenthal of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues showed that injection of a virus directing the expression of a molecule known as insulin-like growth factor I…
-
Health
First indications that aging may be regulated by brain
A little worm called Caenorhabditis elegans was the first creature to have all its genes sequenced, more than 19,000 of them. When the human genome was sequenced, researchers found that…
-
Health
Cognitive testing of elderly could help detect medical problems
Shari Bassuk, research fellow in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues have found that even mild impairments in areas…