Page 4 June 1, 2017 Medical Research Could Be Looking in the Wrong Direction Aging science could beat back cancer, heart disease and the other leading causes of Americans’ death Looking Up CLASSIFIED ADS The deadline for classified copy and payment is NOON on Tuesday. We reserve the right to reject, edit, and determine proper classification of classified ads. Email ad copy to: class@heraldpublications.com. 1x 2x 3x 4x 3 Lines $40 $50 $60 $70 4 Lines $45 $55 $65 $75 Need more lines? Additional line charge of $5 per line ALL SIX NEWSPAPERS – FOR ONE PRICE! Herald Publications newspapers: El Segundo Herald, Hawthorne Press Tribune, Inglewood Daily News, Lawndale Tribune, Manhattan Beach Sun and Torrance Tribune. We take Visa and MasterCard. Please always include your phone number with your submission. Payment must be received before ad is published. How Hard Did It Rain on Mars? Valley networks on Mars show evidence for surface runoff driven by rainfall. Photo by Elsevier.com Based on Press Release from Elsevier, Provided by Bob Eklund Heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet’s impact craters and carved out river-like channels in its surface billions of years ago, according to a new study published in Icarus. In the paper, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory show that changes in the atmosphere on Mars made it rain harder and harder, which had a similar effect on the planet’s surface as we see on Earth. The fourth planet from the Sun, Mars has geological features like the Earth and Moon, such as craters and valleys, many of which were formed through rainfall. Although there is a growing body of evidence that there was once water on Mars, it does not rain there today. But in their new study, geologists Dr. Robert Craddock and Dr. Ralph Lorenz show that there was rainfall in the past—and that it was heavy enough to change the planet’s surface. To work this out, they used methods tried and tested here on Earth, where the erosive effect of the rain on the Earth’s surface has important impacts on agriculture and the economy. “Many people have analyzed the nature of rainfall on the Earth, but no one had thought to apply the physics to understanding the early Martian atmosphere,” said Dr. Craddock of the Smithsonian Institution. To understand how rainfall on Mars has changed over time, the researchers had to consider how the Martian atmosphere has changed. When Mars first formed 4.5 billion years ago, it had a much more substantial atmosphere with a higher pressure than it does now. This pressure influences the size of the raindrops and how hard they fall. Early on in the planet’s existence, water droplets would have been very small, producing something like fog rather than rain; this would not have been capable of carving out the planet we know today. As the atmospheric pressure decreased over millions of years, raindrops got bigger and rainfall became heavy enough to cut into the soil and start to alter the craters. The water could then be channeled and able to cut through the planet’s surface, creating valleys. “By using basic physical principles to understand the relationship between the atmosphere, raindrop size and rainfall intensity, we have shown that Mars would have seen some pretty big raindrops that would have been able to make more drastic changes to the surface than the earlier fog-like droplets,” commented Dr. Lorenz of John Hopkins University, who has also studied liquid methane rainfall on Saturn’s moon Titan, the only other world in the solar system apart from Earth where rain falls onto the surface at the present day. They showed that very early on, the atmospheric pressure on Mars would have been about four bars (the Earth’s surface today is one bar) and the raindrops at this pressure could not have been bigger than three mm across, which would not have penetrated the soil. But as the atmospheric pressure fell to 1.5 bars, the droplets could grow and fall harder, cutting into the soil. In Martian conditions at that time, had the pressure been the same as we have on Earth, raindrops would have been about 7.3 mm—a millimeter bigger than on Earth. “There will always be some unknowns, of course, such as how high a storm cloud may have risen into the Martian atmosphere, but we made efforts to apply the range of published variables for rainfall on Earth,” added Dr. Craddock. • By Rob McCarthy What would life be like if scientists discovered a cure for heart disease or cancer? A breakthrough end to one or both of these leading causes of death would save 600,000 lives every year, for starters. If research yielded a “silver bullet” that killed cancer in the body and stopped the progression of heart damaged, it would be hailed as a modern miracle. However, it wouldn’t guarantee a long and healthy life for many. Curing cancer might add 3.5 years to the average life expectancy and 4.5 years for heart disease, according to Jay Oshansky, a public health researcher. That’s because of what he calls “competing risks,” which are other physical and mental health conditions that can attach to the body’s organs and cells with age. Because people are living longer than any time in modern history, we’re entering uncharted waters. “Keep in mind we got exactly what we wanted, which were longer lives. But the price we had to pay was a rise in heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s,” Oshansky said. People living well into their late 70s and 80s are pushing into unknown medical territory, and it merits more study into the aging process and how to keep people healthy and active for as long as humanely possible, he said. Aging science, Oshansky believes, could beat back cancer, heart disease and the other leading causes of Americans’ death without actually curing them. Researchers of human aging study the human body looking at ways to slow the aging process so that people in their 80s are more like 60-year-olds. Oshansky calls it “pushing off the aging process” and delaying the onset of debilitating diseases. Oshansky is co-author of the book Aging: The Longevity Dividend that describes this emerging science, which is funded at a much lower level than single-disease research efforts run through the Cancer Society or the Alzheimer’s Foundation. When the breakthrough on how to put the brakes on aging comes, Oshansky expects it to dwarf anything being done to slow the progression of cancer. “Aging really underlies everything, though funding for cancer research is far greater,” he says. “This is the next medical advance.” Scientific pursuit involves research dollars --lots of them. Work on aging science is being done close to home, at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Dana Goldman a USC professor and director of the center, is doing research with funding from federal and private sources, including some drug companies and a cancer institute. Goldman co-published a paper with Oshansky and others titled “Society and the Individual at the Dawn of the 21st Century” published in the Handbook of the Psychology of Aging. The paper looked at what’s happening among the older population as the life expectancy moves higher for men and women. U.S. women have pushed the average life span to 80.1, while the men are at 76.4 years. Japanese women are living longest, on average until age 86. Men in Switzerland rank top among males at 80.7 years and outlive American men by more than four years, health statistics show. The leading causes of death for Americans are heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease known as COPD, stroke, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. Yet, medical advances and better treatments are lowering the number of deaths from these six leading killers in the United States. Between 2004 and 2014, age-adjusted death rates among men and women declined 29 percent for stroke; 23 percent for heart disease for men and 27 percent for women; and 16 percent or cancer for men and 13 percent for women, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Deaths due to Alzheimer’s increased over that time by 11 percent for the men and 15 percent for U.S. women. Oshansky and his colleagues aren’t promising a longer life free of cancers and strokes, but they argue that when human aging is better understood, the good times will outweigh the bad times. “A better way to say it is to grow older healthier,” he said. “Taking 70 years to become 50, taking 80 years to become 60. We’ll be able to do what we want longer, remain in the labor force, draw on Medicare less … the benefits to society are huge.” The work to better understand and harness aging goes on coast to coast. A research team at Salk Institute in La Jolla last year reported that it reprogrammed the genetic material of mice, rejuvenating their organs and increasing their lifespans by 30 percent. It’s too early to test on humans, but the Salk scientists now believe it’s possible to turn back the clock on aging. MIT researcher Leonard Guarente, who is a researcher in the field, called it a “pretty remarkable finding”--one that could go down as a bedrock discovery in the history of aging research. •
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