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Showing posts with the label chronological age

Keep Your Brain Young -- Take the Stairs

Okay.  So you wanna know the next news-breaking way to stay young? Climb stairs. That's just what a new study found at Concordia University.  Taking the stairs is normally associated with keeping your body strong and healthy. But new research shows that it improves your brain’s health too — and that education also has a positive effect, according to newswise.com. Scientists at Concordia University’s Montreal-based PERFORM Centre have found that the more flights of stairs a person climbs, and the more years of school a person completes, the “younger” their brain physically appears. The researchers found that brain age decreases by 0.95 years for each year of education, and by 0.58 years for every daily flight of stairs climbed — i.e., the stairs between two consecutive floors in a building. There already exist many ‘Take the stairs’ campaigns in office environments and public transportation centres, say researchers. This study now shows that older adults ne...

Is Your Body Older Than Your Chronological Age? Cancer May Be In Your Future

Grim news. If your biological age (the age your health suggests your body is) is older than your actual age, you could be at high risk of cancer.  The bigger the difference between the two, the greater your risk. A person’s epigenetic age is calculated based on a DNA blood test that looks for methylation markers that could be modified by a person’s environment, including environmental chemicals, obesity, exercise and diet. This test is not commercially available but is currently being studied by academic researchers, including a team at Northwestern. In DNA methylation, a cluster of molecules attaches to a gene and makes the gene more or less receptive to biochemical signals from the body. The gene itself -- your DNA code -- does not change. “This could become a new early warning sign of cancer,” says senior author Dr. Lifang Hou, who led the study, at newswise.com. “The discrepancy between the two ages appears to be a promising tool that could be used to develop an...