• Question: Would any of you research the health in older people (grandparents, senior citizens) as in how they're cells slowly die and if you can find a cure for it? I would like to find this out because it would be interesting and you could be famous for inventing a medicine to keep people alive for longer!

    Asked by puti2shoes1405 to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi,

      This IS what i research, kind of…. i don’t want to make people live longer though.

      I think the problem is that if you look at older people then their cells are old and a lot of things that are making the cells die could have happened many years ago. It’s like watching a grand prix and only seeing the last two laps. You can see what’s changed and how the cells are now, but you don’t know what caused the cells to ‘start dying’ in the first place. It is really important that we study these people as a lot of important diseases are associated with old age and we need to find cures for these so that they can live healthier lives.

      It would be nice to invent something that would make you famous but i don’t think i would like to live forever….would you? 🙂

    • Photo: Georgia Campbell

      Georgia Campbell answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      As Amy said, a lot of the problems in the cells of older people were caused when they were a lot younger, so it would be hard to try and find a cure for cells dying at this point.

      What we can do though, is compare cells from relatively healthy older people and older people with diseases associated with aging, such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons. Then we can see any differences between patients and healthy people of the same age, and try to work out what goes wrong in the cells to cause these diseases.

      A lot of research on older people is more focussed on trying to help people age more healthily – it wouldn’t be very good to get people to live for hundreds of years if we still started getting ‘aging diseases’ at the same ages we do now!

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hello puti2shoes1405

      That’s a great idea. It must be, because my boss already had it! 8) We’re already looking at this sort of thing – I work with data from a group of people called the Lothian Birth Cohort. We have data on their IQ tests at age 11, and we got about 1000 of them back to do the same tests at age 70, where they also donated cells and DNA. They’ve been coming back now again at pretty regular intervals over the last few years and donating more cells, so we can record how things are changing as they get older.

      We’re trying to find out the factors that make people’s brains change and lose function over time. I’m looking at the effects genes have, but there are many other things that could play a role. Once we find out the things that go wrong, that’s the first step to finding a medicine to keep them right.

    • Photo: Ollie Russell

      Ollie Russell answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi puti2shoes1405, I look at mitochondria which make most of the energy for the cell. When we get older they tend to get worse at doing this and can actually make things that damage DNA and cause ageing. If we work out how to make the mitochondria work well for longer, then we could make the cell last longer and therefore we could live longer.

      Like georgia and amy said its really hard to work out what causes damage to the cell in the first place as it probably happened years ago. And while things like the lothian birth cohort are interesting to look at it must be hard to apply the environmental factors that these people experienced such as not having vaccinations, not living through a war and food rationing to our generation. The causes for their ageing may not really apply to us.

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