IN THE NEWS

Walking Speed Can Indicate Aging Speed

The walking speed of someone 45 years old is a good indication of how their brains and bodies are aging, according to Duke University researchers. Slow walkers appear to be aging more rapidly. They perform worse on physical and mental tests and have lost more brain volume in middle age than their peers with a quicker walking pace, according to Terrie Moffitt, senior researcher and Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience. In a study, middle-aged people who walked slower than 3.6 feet per second ranked in the lowest fifth when it came to walking speed and were already showing signs of rapid aging, according to Dr. Stephani Studenski, a geriatrician with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “It takes many body systems to walk well,” Studenski said. “It takes a good heart, lungs, nervous system, strength, musculoskeletal system and a variety of other things. Gait speed summarizes the health of all your body’s systems.” Gait-speed tests, a standard part of geriatric care, are regularly given to people aged 65 and older. “The slower a person walks, that is a good predictor of impending mortality,” Moffitt said. She and her colleagues suspect giving gait tests earlier could serve as an indicator of how well middle-aged people are aging. To test this, the researchers reviewed a long-term study of nearly 1,000 people born in 1972-1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. These people were tested regularly for a wide variety of medical concerns since birth. Moffitt’s team tested their walking speed by having each repeatedly walk down a 25-foot-long electronic pad – first at their normal pace and then as fast as they could. They were also asked to walk as fast as possible while reciting the alphabet backward. They received many different aging tests normally used in geriatric clinics, as well as a variety of mental and physical tests, such as balancing on one foot. Finally the participants had MRI brain scans to test brain volume (a shrinking brain has been linked to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease). The findings showed people in the lowest fifth for walking speed had signs of premature and rapid aging. The slower walkers also looked older to a panel of eight screeners asked to guess participant’s ages from a facial photograph. Middle-aged people with a slower gait could try eating healthily, exercising, quitting smoking and maintaining better control over risk factors such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, according to Studenski and Moffitt. The findings were published online in JAMA Network Open on Oct. 11, 2019.

By Angela S. Hoover, Staff Writer

Rare Childhood Disease Afflicted Dinosaurs

Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) is a rare but painful disease. Benign tumors suddenly appear in the bones of children aged 2 to 10 years. Usually these tumors disappear without intervention. An LCH tumor has been found in the fossilized tail of a young, grasseating herbivore dinosaur that lived on a prairie in southern Alberta, Canada, 66 to 80 million years ago. This is the first time the disease has been identified in a dinosaur. The surprising findings from researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) indicate the disease is not unique to humans and has survived for more than 60 million years. “These kinds of studies, which are now possible thanks to innovative technology, make an important and interesting contribution to evolutionary medicine, a relatively new field of research that investigates the development and behavior of diseases over time,” said Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of TAU’s Department of Anatomy and Anthropology and Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research. “We are trying to understand why certain diseases survive evolution with an eye to deciphering what causes them in order to develop new and effective ways of treating them.” A study on this discovery was published in Scientific Reports on Feb. 10.