You might think that being overweight may cause you health problems only until you finally shed those extra pounds, at which point everything will be fine again. It sounds reasonable, but it might be not so easy. According to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine on December 27, the negative effects of obesity might last even after that extra weight has been lost.

Yes, it appears that being overweight can have lasting consequences that persist long after the weight comes off. Damage to the hematopoietic stem cells can be caused by being overweight, making it all the more reason to try to maintain a healthy weight as part of your personal health and longevity strategy.

We have all seen it, the age-related loss of muscle mass and increasing frailty that generally accompanies advancing age. Recently the World Health Organization classified this age-related muscle wastage as a disease and thus sarcopenia entered official usage to describe it. There are a number of potential causes of sarcopenia and new research suggests that there is a nutritional link between the microbiota and development of the condition.

What is Sarcopenia?

Sarcopenia is the condition that causes the familiar, age-related loss of muscle strength and mass in older people, and it leads to ever-increasing frailty. Frailty makes everyday tasks difficult, affects balance, and can lead to falls, which can be very dangerous for older people.

Summary: Biomarkers of aging would be a breakthrough that slashes the time and cost it currently takes to develop lifespan-extension drugs. [Author: Brady Hartman. This article first appeared on the LongevityFacts.com website. ]

Biomarkers of aging would revolutionize the development of lifespan-extension drugs, helping to bring them out of the laboratory and into the clinic in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. The first scientist to come up with an effective biomarker of aging would produce a true breakthrough for the field of life extension.

Imagine that geroscientists have just developed a miraculous compound called Regulus that promises to extend human lifespans by a significant amount. Unfortunately, the researchers would not have an easy time testing Regulus because humans live a long time. Testing Regulus in mice, would help, but researchers would still have to test the drug’s lifespan-extending effects in humans. Before anti-aging physicians could prescribe Regulus, it would need to undergo an expensive and lengthy clinical trial.

Summary: These breakthroughs in stem cell therapy could potentially rejuvenate our damaged organs with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Moreover, biotech firms are rushing to bring organ-rejuvenating cell therapies to the marketplace. [This article first appeared on the LongevityFacts.com website. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Recent advances in stem cell therapies could translate into effective treatments for intractable diseases.

Stem cells are the repairmen of our bodies. Unlike our ordinary cells, stem cells can divide without limit and create fresh copies of nearly any tissue type to repair damaged organs. While we have an abundance of these repairmen in our youth, we experience stem cell decline as we age.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are one of the most thoroughly studied and understood stem cell types. They are used in a wide range of therapies, and the many studies using MSCs have enjoyed varied levels of success, depending on delivery methods, patients, co-therapies and other factors.

Today, we will be taking a look at MSCs and a new human clinical trial focused on treating osteoarthritis, an age-related inflammatory condition that leads to the breakdown of bone and cartilage.

Victor Björk, biologist and member of the LEAF teama report about a recent aging research conference that he attended in Germany. Victor is one of our more well-traveled writers, and he has the fortune to attend many interesting shows, events, and conferences in Europe. Today Victor reports on the DGfA Aging Conference and also interviews James Peyer from Apollo Ventures, an early-stage life science investor and company builder focused on translational research for age-related diseases.

An annual aging research conference

I took part in the yearly DGfA conference at the Max Planck Institute for Aging Research in Cologne on December 1–2, 2017. The event was organized by the German association for aging research, an interdisciplinary non-profit organization based in Nürnberg. Established in 1990, it conducts research on aging, including research on developing therapeutic options to treat age-related diseases.