Do men and women follow different trajectories to reach extreme longevity?

Trajectories of depressive symptoms in old age: Integrating age-, pathology-, and mortality-related changes.

“…In addition, a substantial body of literature has examined the association between depressive symptoms and a myriad of medical diagnoses in clinical samples, including macular degeneration, diabetes, cancer, cardiac diseases, and comorbidity of multiple chronic health conditions (Ciechanowski, Katon, & Russo, 2000;Rovner, Casten, Hegel, Leiby, & Tasman, 2007). Future research may further validate our findings by including clinical assessments of illness burden, and biological markers of health, such as stress response and immunological functioning (Franceschi et al, 2000), in the examination of longitudinal development of depressive symptoms.Second, the use of a heterogeneous sample in terms of age at baseline (64.9-103.5 years)and an extended follow-up period allowed the examination of age-related changes in depressive symptoms from young-old to oldest-old age. However, in contrast to the 11 yearly assessments in the Florida Retirement Study (Zhang et al, 2009), the intervals between the five waves of our longitudinal study were uneven and more widely spaced in later waves.…”

“…For example, Franceschi et al (2000) reported lower mortality risk in women than men across all age groups, reflecting differences in their genetic makeup and lifestyle choices that have implications for longevity. Hence the gender gap in depressive symptoms may be expected to vary with age because of gender differences in the exposure to risk factors (Mirowsky, 1996).…”

The different apoptotic potential of the p53 codon 72 alleles increases with age and modulates in vivo ischaemia-induced cell death

“…33 Namely, 28 healthy young people (aged 3073 years), 20 healthy aged people (aged 6971 years) selected from a group of actively exercising aged people, in a good physical performance status, 22 healthy centenarians, categorised 'A' for their healthy status, as previously described. 21,22 All the subjects were devoid of any clinical or biochemical abnormalities at the moment of blood collection or skin biopsy. As the p53 codon 72 proline/proline genotype is quite rare in the Italian population (about 8-10%), 33 and that the proline allele is likely to exert a dominant effect on the arginine one (Wu et al, 39 Biros et al 40 and preliminary data, data not shown), two groups of subjects were considered for this study: Pro þ (proline/proline and proline/arginine genotypes) and Arg þ (arginine/arginine genotype) subjects.…”

“…[17][18][19][20] Here we investigated the relationship between the susceptibility to undergo apoptosis and p53 codon 72 genotype in cells (blood leucocytes, dermal fibroblasts (DFs), lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs)) obtained from people of different ages (30-year-old, sexagenarians, and centenarians), all carefully checked for their healthy status. 21 The choice of including cells from healthy centenarians is due to the fact that, at variance with healthy sexagenarians, these people de facto escaped from the detrimental effects of age-related diseases. Consequently, data obtained from their cells offer the possibility to study the mechanisms of physiological (successful) in vivo ageing, disentangling these latter from those of age-related diseases.…”

“…Consequently, data obtained from their cells offer the possibility to study the mechanisms of physiological (successful) in vivo ageing, disentangling these latter from those of age-related diseases. [21][22] 2-Deoxy-D-Ribose (dRib) was chosen as an oxidative stress-inducing agent. 23,24 This molecule belongs to a group of reducing sugars that trigger apoptosis, generating an increase in the levels of intracellular peroxide and carbonil radicals, as well as a decrease in intracellular GSH, all phenomena that can be abrogated by NAcetyl-Cysteine.…”