oa Editorial:A New Journal with an Integrated Approach in the Study of Aging and Longevity

Fascinating biological questions cluster around the phenomenon of development and aging. Does every species age in the same way as the human? Is there a fundamental process of “aging” common to all organisms? How does aging occur in plants? How does the aging process deviate from the “normal” to cause aging-related disorders in long-lived species? Can one prevent and/or modify the aging process? How do environment and genes play a part in this process? Can we learn something from various human lifestyles, diets, cultures, environments and even from other species in order to enhance healthy aging? Indeed, the quest to maintain healthy, long life by mankind has been going on from time immemorial. We are just beginning to answer some of these questions from current research work. The major characteristics of aging are the deteriorative changes with time during postmaturational life and progressive inability to withstand stresses, making the organism vulnerable to disease and increasing the risk of death [1]. Various lines of research are helping us to understand the mechanisms of aging. First, the metabolically-based “Free radical damage theory” may explain some aspects of aging [2]. Studies on the biology of aging suggest that it results from normal processes that living cells employ to “burn fuel” supplying life's most important necessity, energy. Paradoxically, this indirectly results in much of the disease and disability that characterizes aging in humans and other animals. Indeed, free oxygen radicals, which are chemically unstable by-products of cellular oxidation, can start and propagate the deterioration of cell membranes and macromolecules [2,3]. Such accumulation of small “hits” causing cellular injury has far-reaching results ranging from uncorrected mutations and cancers to Alzheimer's disease and vascular pathology [3]. Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, stroke and diabetes are now among the leading causes of aging-related death in the United States [4], and they are increasing as the median age of US residents increases. These diseases are a major focus of current biomedical research, and their pathology is related to the aging process in complex ways. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is proposed that increases in brain size and the human life span over the past million years were happening along with changes in nutritional priorities and slower developmental rates [5]. These changes were accompanied by resistance for inflammation during the extreme prehistoric environments [5]. Findings from a wide range of disciplines point toward reduced levels of inflammation as a key factor in the recent increase in human life-spans. From the dietary perspective, the inclusion of more meat into the human diet supplied protein needed for larger brains but involved new physiological and genetic trade-offs between fitness and risk for long-term damage [6]. This scenario provides an adequate rationale for why variants of some genes for metabolizing animal fat (such as those of the ApoE gene family), which are linked to a human predisposition for atherosclerosis, some cancers, and the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer's disease, are not shared by our closest primate relatives [6]. Similarly, a diet too rich in animal fat may result in increasing exposure to pathogenic microbes and exacerbating inflammation and may accelerate aging. In the same topic of diet, current research in calorie restriction is another important line of aging research. Indeed, dietary restriction affects life-span and spontaneous cancer incidence [7]. From the point of reproductive physiology, the recent study of reproductive aging in female birds is quite fruitful and birds serve as a good model to study oxidative damage [8]. Regarding the role of hormones, measurements of serum levels of a number of potential steroidal and peptidic neuroendocrine aging markers have recently shed some important light into the human male aging progression [9]............