Introduction and Method
Christopher Cumo in Ancestral Diets and Nutrition, 2020
Lifespan may be the toughest parameter to interpret because so many variables affect it. For example, American historian Richard Slator Dunn (b. 1928) blamed tropical diseases, undernutrition, overwork, suicide, execution, accidents, and poor medical care for slaves’ brief lives in the Caribbean islands in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.89 Interplay among these factors prevented him from attempting to gauge which was most lethal. The situation is even more complex because recent research indicates that, independent of other variables, poverty shortens life.90 Moreover, upbringing, marital status, and hereditary factors like gender and ethnicity modify lifespan. This mélange complicates attempts to pinpoint diet and nutrition’s roles in longevity.
Introduction to the field of Gerontology
Jennifer R. Sasser, Harry R. Moody in Gerontology, 2018
So, back to the “epic” story of increases in human longevity during the 20th century. In the span of a mere one hundred years, the average life expectancy increased by 30 years. An increase of this size, as far as historical and fossil records suggest, is unprecedented. As a result, there are more long-lived people living among us than ever before. At the same time – and this is important to understand – the maximum human lifespan, officially documented at 122 years, hasn’t changed. While we’ve been considering population aging, we might wonder about the significant increase in human longevity – more people living longer – and how this plays out for individuals? Who has benefitted, and who hasn’t, from increases in human longevity? And, an important related question: some of us may gain additional years in adulthood, but what is the quality of these additional years? These are some of the “Big Questions” asked in Gerontology.
Companion Animals Models of Human Disease
Rebecca A. Krimins in Learning from Disease in Pets, 2020
Domesticated species, such as dogs and cats, represent interesting model systems for aging. Even though the average canine life span of 10–12 years discourages longevity studies, dogs spontaneously develop many age-related phenotypes, such as muscular and neurological decline, as well as cardiovascular disease. Rodents, however, do not develop significant neurodegeneration with age unless severely genetically manipulated. Dogs may therefore be particularly interesting in the study of cognitive deterioration and age-associated neurodegenerative disorders. In addition, the physiology and pathology of dogs have been extremely well characterized. Similarly, cats represent another physiologically well-characterized domesticated animal that has been used in aging studies. As in dogs, several pathological age-associated processes occur in felines, including kidney disease, arthritis, sarcopenia, and neurological decline. Cats live an average of 12–14 years, and life span studies in this species are therefore also problematic; however, their aging phenotype may make them attractive models.
Survival and mortality following TBI
Published in Brain Injury, 2018
Zeev Groswasser, Israela Peled
Life expectancy for a group of individuals is an estimation of the average future life span of this group. LE is based on a survivor function of the probability to die. The Lifetest procedure of SAS was used to calculate the LE of the TBI sample, based on the KM and the life table methods. Because in statistical terms our sample was relatively small, with an extremely large censored data (88.5%), the mean of the cohort (the LE) was found to be a missing value. Therefore, evaluation of LE was performed using the methodology described by De Vivo (5,16,31,34), that is by applying the SMR of patients with TBI to the latest age–gender-specific mortality rates of the Israeli population, available at the time of the study (25,26). Other extrapolation regression methods, like the Monte Carlo method, logistic regression, Poisson regression and the Lifereg procedure of SAS were also tried (1,7,19,25,28,29,33,36,38). All of the analyses were conducted using the SAS system, version 9.2 (SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC, USA), enabled by Tel-Aviv University.
Evaluation of the possible association of body mass index and four metabolic gene polymorphisms with longevity in an Italian cohort: a role for APOE, eNOS and FTO gene polymorphisms
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2019
Alfredo Santovito, Gabriella Galli, Stefano Ruberto
Epidemiological studies have shown that ∼ 25–30% of the overall variation in human lifespan can be attributed to genetic factors, which are mainly apparent after the age of 60 years and become more relevant for extreme longevity. In addition to the genetic background, longevity is also determined by environmental factors associated with social structure, culture and lifestyle (Montesano et al. 2012; Deelen et al. 2013). Among these environmental factors, nutritional status seems to be the principal factor associated with variations in lifespan. In particular, among the anthropometric parameters associated with longevity, BMI seems to be the most important (Frayling et al. 2007). Indeed, high values of this index are linked to increased incidence of cardiovascular and cancer diseases, and, in general, to high mortality rates (Kong et al. 2017). In our sample we observed an increase in BMI with age (Table 2), but the oldest group did not show significant differences with respect to the youngest group, indicating a possible positive effect of low values of BMI in longevity.
Erectile Dysfunction and Partner-Directed Behaviors in Romantic Relationships: The Mediating Role of Suspicious Jealousy
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, 2022
Gavin Vance, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Rachel M. James, Todd K. Shackelford
The purpose of Study 1 was to examine whether the self-reported suspicious jealousy of men (but not their reactive jealousy) would mediate the associations that ED had with their self-reported partner-directed behaviors. More specifically, we expected that ED would lead men to report experiencing greater feelings of suspicious jealousy that, in turn, would promote more frequent use of mate retention behaviors, more frequent use of partner-directed insults, more frequent use of partner-directed violence, and more injuries inflicted on their partner. We focused only on the self-reported experiences of 18–45-year-old men in Study 1. Although the current average lifespan in the U.S. is approximately 78 years (World Development Indicators, 2021), archeological data suggests that the average lifespan of ancestral humans may have been around 30–40 years for those who survived past infancy (Finch, 2012). Therefore, the ability of selective forces to act on older men experiencing ED may have been limited over the course of human evolutionary history. Our goal in focusing on the 18–45 age range was to assess the associations that ED had with jealousy and mate retention behaviors in men during their prime reproductive years, ideally obtaining the most accurate representations of evolved mechanisms.
Related Knowledge Centers
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