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Journal ArticleDOI

Broken Limits to Life Expectancy

Jim Oeppen, +1 more
- 10 May 2002 - 
- Vol. 296, Iss: 5570, pp 1029-1031
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TLDR
The evidence presented in this paper suggests that the apparent leveling off of life expectancy in various countries is an artifact of laggards catching up and leaders falling behind, not a sign that life expectancy is approaching its limit.
Abstract
Is human life expectancy approaching its limit? Many--including individuals planning their retirement and officials responsible for health and social policy--believe it is, but the evidence presented in the Policy Forum suggests otherwise. For 160 years, best-performance life expectancy has steadily increased by a quarter of a year per year, an extraordinary constancy of human achievement. Mortality experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is close to an ultimate ceiling; these experts have repeatedly been proven wrong. The apparent leveling off of life expectancy in various countries is an artifact of laggards catching up and leaders falling behind.

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A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

TL;DR: Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, it is shown that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self- control.
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Ageing populations: the challenges ahead

TL;DR: Research suggests that ageing processes are modifiable and that people are living longer without severe disability, and this finding will be important for the chances to meet the challenges of ageing populations.
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ADOLESCENT RESILIENCE: A Framework for Understanding Healthy Development in the Face of Risk

TL;DR: The authors discuss three models of resilience, the compensatory, protective, and challenge models, and describe how resilience differs from related concepts, and discuss implications that resilience research has for intervention and describe some resilience-based interventions.
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Aging with multimorbidity: a systematic review of the literature

TL;DR: Methodological issues in evaluating multimorbidity are discussed as well as future research needs, especially concerning etiological factors, combinations and clustering of chronic diseases, and care models for persons affected by multiple disorders.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Oxidants, oxidative stress and the biology of ageing.

TL;DR: Evidence that the appropriate and inappropriate production of oxidants, together with the ability of organisms to respond to oxidative stress, is intricately connected to ageing and life span is reviewed.
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Pleiotropy, natural selection, and the evolution of senescence

TL;DR: August Weismann's theory is subject to a number of criticisms, the most forceful of which are: 1) The fallacy of identifying senescence with mechanical wear, 2) the extreme rarity, in natural populations, of individuals that would be old enough to die of the postulated death-mechanism, 3) the failure of several decades of gerontological research to uncover any deathmechanisms, and 4) the difficulties involved in visualizing how such a feature could be produced
Journal Article

Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence

TL;DR: A new individual entering a population may be said to have a reproductive probability distribution as discussed by the authors, where the reproductive probability is zero from zygote to reproductive maturity, i.e., the individual will have no reproductive capability from birth to maturity.
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Small molecule activators of sirtuins extend Saccharomyces cerevisiae lifespan

TL;DR: The potent activator resveratrol, a polyphenol found in red wine, lowers the Michaelis constant of SIRT1 for both the acetylated substrate and NAD+, and increases cell survival by stimulating Sirt1-dependent deacetylation of p53.
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A C. elegans mutant that lives twice as long as wild type

TL;DR: Finding that mutations in the gene daf-2 can cause fertile, active, adult Caenorhabditis elegans hermaphrodites to live more than twice as long as wild type raises the possibility that the longevity of the dauer is not simply a consequence of its arrested growth, but instead results from a regulated lifespan extension mechanism that can be uncoupled from other aspects of dauer formation.
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