Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Want to live longer? Lace on those sneakers and get moving. A new study shows improved mortality with running even 5-10 minutes a day twice a week. With increased running, mortality rises further. The major risk - heatstroke. So run wisely.

Medpage Today
Putting Breaking Medical News Into Practice

Cardiovascular

Run for Your Life? Right!

Published: Jul 29, 2014 | Updated: Jul 30, 2014

Running for even 5 to 10 minutes a day, once or twice a week, or at slow speeds was associated with substantial mortality benefits over 15 years, a prospective study showed.

Runners overall had 30% and 45% lower adjusted risks of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality, respectively, over that period and had 3 years longer life expectancy compared with nonrunners, Duck-chul Lee, PhD, of Iowa State University in Ames, and colleagues found.

Running for less than 60 minutes a week -- averaging out to about 8 minutes a day -- was associated with an odds ratios of 0.73 for death from any cause (95% CI 0.61-0.86) and 0.46 for cardiovascular mortality (95% CI 0.33-0.65) compared with nonrunners after adjustment for other factors, including total physical activity from other leisure-time activities.

The associations were also significant at the lowest quintiles of weekly running distance (less than 6 miles), frequency (one to two times), amount (under 506 metabolic equivalent of task or MET-minutes), and speed (less than 6 miles/hour), the group reported in the August 5 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

"This study may motivate healthy but sedentary individuals to begin and continue running for substantial and attainable mortality benefits," Lee and colleagues suggested.

Clinical Implications

The effect of “just doing something at slightly higher intensity” was profound, commented Barry Franklin, PhD, director of preventive cardiology and cardiac rehabilitation in the Beaumont Health System in Royal Oak, Mich.

“A 30% to 40% reduction in mortality -- that’s huge. That’s equivalent to the same mortality reductions we get by taking a cholesterol-lowering statin or going on a beta-blocker or taking a statin,” he told MedPage Today.

The message that some is better than none is important given that 40% to 80% of the global population remains sedentary despite known health benefits of physical activity, Chi Pang Wen, MD, DrPH, of Taiwan's Institute of Population Health Sciences in Zhunan, and colleagues agreed in an accompanying editorial.

Running is clearly better than walking for the same amount of time in terms of mortality, although walking is probably safer and easier to sustain for those starting from zero, they noted.

About a quarter of long-term runners end up with some type of injury that prevents them from continuing, but that risk is much lower for those who do small amounts rather than endurance running, added Paul Thompson, MD, chief of cardiology and The Athletes’ Heart Program at the Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn.

“One of the things patients frequently say to me is that I’m too busy to get any exercise. Well, that’s true if you’re going to do something that takes a lot of time, like walking,” he told MedPage Today. “The most important thing …  is just do it.”

Otherwise healthy patients expect and should get an "exercise prescription" at office visits, Wen's group argued.

"Although devising a customized exercise prescription for each patient may sound complicated, 15 minutes of brisk walking or 5 minutes of running is all it takes for most clinic patients," they wrote.

"A simple message, delivered with sincerity, needs to be repeated every time we encounter our patients. As doctors, we should 'walk the talk,' spending at least 15 min/day in dedicated exercise, while also advocating building a culture of physical activity around us. We do not need to be athletes to exercise -- it should be part of all of our daily routines."

Running Risks

Another study in the same JACC issue suggested that for people who do get involved in long-distance running, heat stroke was more of a serious problem than arrhythmic or other cardiac events during marathons and other foot races.

The retrospective analysis of all long-distance races in Tel Aviv from March 2007 through November 2013 with a total of 137,580 runners turned up only two serious cardiac events -- one heart attack and one hypotensive supraventricular tachyarrhythmia, neither deadly or life threatening.

In the same group, there were 21 serious cases of heat stroke, including two fatalities and 12 that were life threatening.

"Our results put in a different perspective the ongoing debate about the role of pre-participation electrocardiographic screening for the prevention of sudden death in athletes," Sami Viskin, MD, of Tel Aviv Medical Center and colleagues concluded.

The temperatures of Tel Aviv might not generalize broadly to other areas, but the lessons still apply, Brian Olshansky, MD, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and David Cannom, MD, of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, and colleagues argued in another accompanying editorial in JACC.

"The first is that heat stroke is common in warm climates during long-distance running races, and the second is that heat stroke can be successfully treated if it is suspected in a runner who collapses," they wrote.

Heat stroke isn't like potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias where there's a predictive clinical profile that screening could potentially uncover, the editorialists noted.

In Tel Aviv, race physicians and technicians were trained to diagnose and care for heat stroke and were prepared to take a rectal temperature in the field when a runner collapsed to determine cause.

"The emphasis on training the medical team to look for this problem seems to account for the high number of diagnosed cases and the high recovery rate," Olshansky and Cannom suggested. "Without an early, accurate diagnosis, the necessary aggressive treatment may not be delivered."

Running and Mortality

Lee's study looking for health benefits of running regardless of distance included 55,137 adults, ages 18 to 100 (mean 44), in the prospective, observational Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study who had been self-, employer-, or physician-referred for periodic preventive medical examinations at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas.

Among them, 24% reported running during the 3 months prior to the baseline questionnaire. About a third of the cohort had follow-up questionnaire responses available on running behaviors.

"Not running was almost as important as hypertension, accounting for 16% of all-cause and 25% of cardiovascular disease mortality," the researchers noted.

The dose-response analyses suggested that more running wasn't that much better than a little each week in terms of mortality risk.

"In fact, among runners (after nonrunners were excluded in the analyses), there were no significant differences in hazard ratios of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality across quintiles of weekly running time (all P values >0.10)," they pointed out.

Adjusted hazard ratios across those groups compared with nonrunners were:
  • For less than 60 min per week: 0.73 for all-cause mortality (95% CI 0.61-0.86) and 0.46 for cardiovascular mortality (95% CI 0.33-0.65)
  • For 60 to 119 min per week: 0.65 (95% CI 0.56-0.75) and 0.56 (95% CI 0.43-0.73)
  • For 120 to 179 min per week: 0.71 (95% CI 0.59-0.86) and 0.54 (95% CI 0.38-0.77)
  • For 180 min or more per week: 0.76 (95% CI 0.63-0.92) and 0.65 (95% CI 0.46-0.92)
Some studies have suggested somewhat less or no mortality benefit at high doses of vigorous intensity physical activity, the researchers pointed out.

"Thus, future studies are needed on this dose-response issue about whether there is an optimum upper limit of vigorous-intensity activities, beyond which additional activity provides no further mortality benefits," Lee's group cautioned.

Excluding the 39% of runners who also reported other physical activities left all the associations significant, as did adjustment for possible mediating variables, such as body mass index and medical conditions.

The 13% of runners who stuck with it over an average 5.9 years appeared to have gained the most, with a 29% reduced all-cause mortality risk and 50% lower cardiovascular mortality.

One limitation was that the Cooper Clinic cohort was largely a white, upper to upper-middle class population, Franklin cautioned.

“I’m not sure that these data can be generalized to the population at large,” he told MedPage Today.
Thompson also questioned the ability of the study to entirely adjust for the differences in characteristics between runners and nonrunners.

While the study couldn't draw causal association, the editorialists noted the consistent results across sensitivity analyses, and consistency with findings from prospective randomized trials in secondary cardiovascular prevention.

"The reality is that a virtuous cycle exists for an iterative process of incremental exercise promoting incremental health, and the healthier individuals in turn being more likely to exercise, blurring the simple cause-and-effect relationship," Wen's group wrote.

Monday, July 21, 2014

If you're one of those weekend athletes who have have fallen, tripped, tumbled, or otherwise had reason to hit your head - or have a child playing sports who has hit his/her head - be aware that the effects of a concussion can appear later and last longer than you think. Now a new study discusses the possibility for structural damage and why it's wise not to return to full activity too soon.


Even Mild Concussions Can Cause Memory Problems

Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images


By Barbara Bronson Gray
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 16, 2014 (HealthDay News) — A mild or moderate concussion may have longer-lasting consequences than previously realized, a new study suggests.

By comparing brain imaging studies and thinking tests between healthy people and those with relatively minor concussions, the researchers found that the recovery of thinking skills can take a long time. Minor concussions can be caused by events such as falling off a bike, being in a slow-speed car crash or being hit in a fist-fight.

Initially, those with concussions had thinking and memory test scores that were 25 percent lower than those in healthy people. One year after injury, however, while the scores for those with and without concussions were similar, those who had had brain injuries still had evidence of brain damage on imaging tests, with clear signs of continued disruption to key brain cells.

The findings are especially important because 90 percent of all traumatic brain injuries are mild to moderate, said Andrew Blamire, senior author of the study and professor of magnetic resonance physics at Newcastle University, in the United Kingdom.

And, Dr. Michael O’Brien, director of the sports concussion clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital, pointed out that “it’s really good for people to know — those who are suffering with school performance, physical performance and even social issues — the fact that there is actual structural damage, even a year after the injury.”

The research was published online July 16 and in the Aug. 5 print issue of Neurology.

A concussion is a type of brain injury that occurs when the head hits an object, when a moving object strikes the head, or when the head experiences a sudden force without being hit directly. There are about 2 to 4 million concussion injuries from sports and recreation in the United States every year, according to the American Academy of Neurology. Most concussions result in full recovery.

Kids are particularly vulnerable to the impact of concussions because they are still developing, and they can easily accumulate multiple injuries over the years, said O’Brien. In addition, the pressure to perform on the field, and in the classroom, can slow recovery, he added.

The question of how brain injury affects thinking has been difficult for experts to answer because while CT and MRI scans can show injury to a particular area, it may not show signs of more diffuse damage. As a result, researchers have not been able to show clear connections between what they find on imaging studies and tests of thinking, Blamire said.

Complicating the problem is the fact that symptoms alone often do not tell the whole story. “The level of symptoms doesn’t always correlate to the level of damage,” said O’Brien. And, other issues, like depression or low thyroid levels can mimic concussion, he added.

For the study, 44 people with mild concussion and nine people with moderate concussion were compared to 33 participants with no brain injury. All of the participants took thinking and memory skills tests and had an MRI scan that was particularly sensitive to brain cell damage.

Those with concussions had scans an average of six days after their injury. A year later, 23 of those who had concussions had another MRI scan and re-took the thinking and memory skills test.

A year after the initial symptoms of a mild or moderate concussion had passed, some evidence of brain damage was still present, the researchers found.

What is especially challenging is the fact that every patient is different, said Blamire. “While injury severity does relate to outcome, it isn’t straightforward to predict precisely,” he noted.

O’Brien said that the standard of concussion care now is based on symptom reporting and using protocols that require people to commit an initial period of time to suspending physical and mental activity, followed by a very gradual increase in activity. But knowing when it’s safe to return to high levels of physical and mental activity isn’t easy, he explained.

“There are downsides to returning athletes to full activity too early: their likelihood of getting re-injured is higher, and recovery may be prolonged,” O’Brien said.

More information
Learn more about concussion from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

If you run, you'll probably experience shin splints at some point. And when you do, they don't have to stop you from continuing your exercise or training routine. A Los Angeles Times article talks about causes and risks while suggesting remedies and the continuation of modified and active training.

Los Angeles Times -

Shin splints, a nagging injury that doesn't have to sideline exercise

 

 
Shin splints, a common injury, can take time, ice and smarts to heal.  Shin splints? Cross-training can keep you active while you recover.  Normally, Melissa Lane keeps her exercise regimen steady and moderate: a little CrossFit, a little jogging. Slow jogging.
 
Then, in February, Lane had a fun idea: She would add interval training on the weekends with her boys, ages 10 and 13. They'd walk a minute, then sprint a minute, doing 10 cycles of each up and down the sidewalk outside their Culver City home. To give each boy private time with her, Lane walked and ran with them separately, getting in 40 cycles each weekend.

The kids loved it. After a couple of weekends of this, Lane's shins did not.


She had developed shin splints, the bane of many an athlete who has taken up a new pursuit too enthusiastically, too quickly.

"It feels like an ache in your shins," said Lane, 43. "When you take any kind of springy step, you feel an ache that makes you want to [stop running and] walk again."

A minor case of shin splints can ache for days at a time; more serious injuries may take up to six months to heal. The key to managing shin splints, experts say, is care and moderation. In other words, ignore those twinges at your peril.
"I tell people, if you are feeling pain, stop what you are doing," said Fred Azar, a Memphis, Tenn., orthopedist and president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

When you get home, ice it and take an anti-inflammatory, such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Afterward, don't cease all activity, Azar said, but decrease your intensity, and cross-train with other sports while you allow your injury to heal.

Cause and risks
The technical name is medial tibial stress syndrome, though doctors as well as patients call them shin splints, Azar said. The injury itself is caused by stress on the soft tissue surrounding the tibia bone, which is the large bone in the lower leg. The tissue, called the periosteum, gets inflamed, and that's what causes the ache.

Stress fractures, unlike shin splints, generally are limited to one leg at a time. If pain is intense in one shin, on one spot, it's worth a visit to the doctor, said Heather Gillespie, a sports medicine physician at UCLA.

As in Lane's case, the typical shin splint sufferer is someone who's recently changed up her running routine. "They often occur if you increase your training, start running on harder surfaces or if you change your shoes and that changes the way you are running," Gillespie said. Other risky activities include dancing (all that bouncing) or basic military training (the stress of introducing a sudden, intense workout regimen). Also, people with flat arches are more likely to experience shin splints because they lack strength in their feet.

Lane's boys did not suffer the same fate she did — active kids who run around all day, every day, their shins felt fine after the weekend sprints. But Lane was lucky too; after about a month she returned to interval training with her boys — only now she leaves the sprinting to her younger competitors.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

A new study indicates that organic food has more antioxidants and less pesticides than comparative food (thus you can afford the extra cost by not buying antioxidant supplements), but it seems the jury is still out on how much more of a benefit is the organic produce. In any case, less pesticides is neither a bad thing for the environment nor your gut.

N.Y. Times - 

 

Environment

Study of Organic Crops Finds Fewer Pesticides and More Antioxidants


A hydroponic greenhouse in Connecticut. An estimate says that domestic organic food sales reached $32.3 billion last year. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Adding fuel to the debates over the merits of organic food, a comprehensive review of earlier studies found substantially higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of pesticides in organic fruits, vegetables and grains compared with conventionally grown produce.

“It shows very clearly how you grow your food has an impact,” said Carlo Leifert, a professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University in England, who led the research. “If you buy organic fruits and vegetables, you can be sure you have, on average, a higher amount of antioxidants at the same calorie level.”

However, the full findings, to be published next week in the British Journal of Nutrition, stop short of claiming that eating organic produce will lead to better health.

“We are not making health claims based on this study, because we can’t,” Dr. Leifert said. The study, he said, is insufficient “to say organic food is definitely healthier for you, and it doesn’t tell you anything about how much of a health impact switching to organic food could have.”

A review of earlier studies found significant differences between organic and conventionally grown produce. Credit Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times

Still, the authors note that other studies have suggested some of the antioxidants have been linked to a lower risk of cancer and other diseases.

The conclusions in the new report run counter to those of a similar analysis published two years ago by Stanford scientists, who found few differences in the nutritional content of organic and conventionally grown foods. Those scientists said the small differences that did exist were unlikely to influence the health of the people who chose to buy organic foods, which are usually more expensive.

The Stanford study, like the new study, did find pesticide residues were several times higher on conventionally grown fruits and vegetables, but played down the significance, because even the higher levels were largely below safety limits.

Organic farming, by and large, eliminates the use of conventional chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Those practices offer ecological benefits like healthier soils but produce less bountiful harvests. The Organic Trade Association, an industry organization, estimated organic food sales last year in the United States at $32.3 billion, or just over 4 percent of the total market.

What is disputed, vociferously, is whether organic fruits and vegetables provide a nutritional lift. Many naysayers regard organic as a marketing ploy to charge higher prices.

“The other argument would be, if you just eat a little bit more fruits and vegetables, you’re going to get more nutrients,” said Alan D. Dangour, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr. Dangour led a review published in 2009 that found no significant nutritional differences between conventional and organic foods.

Such differences are difficult to discern, because other factors that can vary widely from place to place and year to year, like the weather, also influence the nutrients. Even if differences exist, it is unclear whether they would affect consumer health.

In the new study, an international team of scientists did not conduct any laboratory or field work of their own. Instead, they compiled a database from 343 previously published studies and performed a statistical procedure known as a meta-analysis, which attempts to ferret robust bits of information from studies of varying designs and quality.

Some of the studies reported many measurements, some only a few. Some included several crops grown over multiple years, while others looked at only a few samples. But if done properly, the results of a meta-analysis can be greater than the average of its parts.

Over all, organic crops contained 17 percent more antioxidants than conventionally grown crops, the new study found. For some classes of antioxidants, the difference was larger. A group of compounds known as flavanones, for example, were 69 percent higher in the organic produce. (At very high quantities, as in some supplements, some antioxidants have been shown to be harmful, but the levels in organic produce were not nearly that high.)

The researchers said they analyzed the data in several different ways, and each time the general results remained robust.

The study cost $429,000, which came from the European Union and the Sheepdrove Trust, a British charity that supports organic farming research. The scientists said the money came with no strings, and their research passed the rigor of scientific peer review for publication.

Charles M. Benbrook, a professor at Washington State University and another author of the paper, said this analysis improved on earlier reviews, in part because it incorporated recent new studies.
The findings fit with the expectation that without pesticides, plants would produce more antioxidants, many of which serve as defenses against pests and disease.

The study also found that organically produced foods, particularly grains, contain lower levels of cadmium, a toxic metal that sometimes contaminates conventional fertilizers. Dr. Benbrook said the researchers were surprised by that finding; there was no difference in other toxic metals like mercury and lead.

Even with the differences and the indications that some antioxidants are beneficial, nutrition experts said the “So what?” question had yet to be answered.

“After that, everything is speculative,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “It’s a really hard question to answer.”

Dr. Nestle said she buys organic foods, because she believes they are better for the environment and wants to avoid pesticides. “If they are also more nutritious, that’s a bonus,” she said. “How significant a bonus? Hard to say.”

She continued: “There is no reason to think that organic foods would be less nutritious than conventional industrial crops. Some studies in the past have found them to have more of some nutrients. Other studies have not. This one looked at more studies and has better statistics.”

Dr. Dangour, however, remained entirely unconvinced. He said the researchers erred in not excluding the weaker studies from the analysis. “To my mind, there’s no convincing evidence that these foods are different in nutritional composition,” he said.

Monday, July 7, 2014

An article in the Washington Post discusses new facial recognition technology that may provide insight into your future well-being. If the technology were able to foretell future health, would you make the changes needed today to insure a healthier tomorrow?

 The Washington Post - 

 

Can your face reveal how long you’ll live? New technology may provide the answer.


July 2
 
Researchers are working on technology that will look at the way a person's face has aged so far to estimate how it may age in the future. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)
 
Imagine that an insurance underwriter comes to your house and, along with noting your weight and blood pressure, snaps a photo of your face. And that those wrinkles, mottled spots and saggy parts, when fed into a computer, could estimate how long you will live.

Facial recognition technology, long used to search for criminals and to guess how a missing child might look as an adult, may soon become personal. A group of scientists is working on a system that would analyze an individual’s prospects based on how his or her face has aged.

“We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly,” said Jay Olshansky, a biodemographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago who came up with the idea. “And we also know that the children of people who senesce more slowly tend to live longer than other people.”

The research is still in its early stages, but the idea of using facial recognition technology has prompted interest from insurance company executives who see potential for using it in determining premiums, Olshansky said. There’s also a potential benefit for individuals: The technology might prod them to change their health habits before it’s too late.

The technology involves using a computer to scan a photograph of a face for signs of aging. Factoring in the subject’s race, gender, education level and smoking history — all known to affect longevity prospects — it would analyze each section of cheek, eye, brow, mouth and jowl looking for shading variations that signal lines, dark spots, drooping and other age-related changes that might indicate how the person is doing compared with others of the same age and background.

As the United States skews increasingly older, research into extending life span and, in particular, increasing the number of healthy years is a boom topic for public and private entities.

Google last fall announced Calico, a new enterprise focusing on aging and associated diseases, for which it has been recruiting top scientists; it has not revealed details of its plans or how much it is investing. Another organization, Human Longevity Inc., headed by the well-known genomics researcher Craig Venter, launched this spring with plans to build a database of human DNA sequencing to tackle diseases of aging; it raised $70 million in an initial round of funding.

And the National Institutes of Health recently launched an unprecedented collaborative initiative across 20 of its 27 specialized institutes to address aging and longevity. National Institute on Aging director Richard Hodes said the NIH would also like to work on the topic with some of the emerging organizations.


 
A new system uses a complicated algorithm and a growing database of faces to assess how old parts of a person’s face appear to be. Researchers behind the site hope to one day link the appearance of aging to longevity. Here’s what the computer said about two Post reporters. 
 
The economic and social implications could be staggering. Not only will living to 100 become more common one day, longevity experts say, but the quality of life in the final decades might also be drastically improved, reducing the burdens imposed by an aging population.

Increasing life expectancy by 2.2 years by slowing aging would save $7.1 trillion in disability and entitlement programs over 50 years, according to a paper in Health Affairs co-authored by Olshansky, who is also a research associate at the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging.

Longevity scientists say the key to extending healthy life lies in focusing on aging itself rather than on aging-related diseases. Even minor progress in slowing the aging process would be more groundbreaking than major progress that tackles just one illness, they say.

In fact, drugs already in use for some age-related diseases may turn out to work because they are delaying aging overall.

“We may be at the beginning of a time when drugs approved for diabetes or macular degeneration are actually working because they are delaying the onset of aging,” said Dan Perry, founder of the Alliance for Aging Research, a Washington-based advocacy group.

And while it is not yet clear whether humans will one day live 150 years, as some have predicted, scientists are optimistic that the number of years of healthy life — or “health span” — of humans can be significantly increased and the infirmities associated with aging reduced.

“Aging is not such a deep part of our biology that it can’t be changed,” said Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “All this stuff seemed like science fiction a few years ago, but now we have it, at least in mice.”

A personal approach
 
The idea for the facial recognition project came to Olshansky a couple of years ago during dinner with an insurance underwriter . “He was complaining that he had a very short time to assess people’s survival prospects” and that the methods used to do it were too blunt, Olshansky said.

Olshansky, whose work includes exploring the limits to human longevity, slowing aging and studying health and public-policy implications of individual and population aging, knew that people who live longer generally look younger than other people of their age. He wondered whether that knowledge could translate into something more scientific.

He contacted Karl Ricanek, a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who has worked on facial recognition technology for the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI; along with a biostatistician and other computer scientists, they developed a program to analyze photographs of faces.

They have launched a Web site inviting anyone in the world to submit a photo. The database they are developing, called Face My Age, is expected to deliver increasingly more accurate assessments and predictions as more people participate. The researchers are hoping for large numbers of people — at least 10,000 or 20,000, but preferably more — to submit photos and basic biographical information in exchange for feedback on how quickly they are aging and what this means for their longevity prospects. The person in the photo cannot smile or have makeup on, and must reveal if he or she has had plastic surgery.


Staff writer Tara Bahrampour is shown here in an actual photograph taken at her current age of 47. The images at later ages were produced using computer technology developed by researchers at Face Aging Group at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. (The Washington Post)
 
The technique is more personalized than the current approach to face aging.

“The technology that is out there utilizes group norms, so they can artificially age you,” Ricanek said. “But . . . the lines they paint on your face are actually the same as the lines they paint on my face, [whereas] the ones we’re using are individual.”

Initially the site will give users only one number — their apparent age — but as it becomes more refined, it should be able to assign perceived ages to different parts of the face, Olshansky said.

“Imagine taking your iPhone and snapping a selfie and putting it into our Web site and discovering that your eyes are that of a 50-year-old, your lips are that of a 70-year-old, your cheeks are that of a 50-year-old,” he said.

The algorithms work differently for people of different genders and ethnic groups, Ricanek said. For example, the skin of lighter-complected individuals, which has less melanin, tends to age more as a result of sun exposure than the skin of people with darker complexions. Women’s faces tend to age more quickly than men’s because of different distributions of fat and blood vessels.


Staff writer Robert Samuels is shown here in an actual photograph taken at his current age 29. The images at later ages were produced using computer technology developed by researchers at Face Aging Group at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. (The Washington Post)
 
Wait and see
 
It won’t be clear how well the technology works until enough participants die and the researchers can see how good their estimates were. But the project recently got a boost when it gained access to several thousand photos taken years ago of people, some of whom have subsequently died; knowing the date of death for so many will allow the Web site to start providing users with even more reliable life span estimates in the next 12 to 18 months, Olshansky said.

If successful, it could be used not only by insurance companies but also by health advocates, financial institutions and other scientists.

The concept is intriguing — if it works, said Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. But he said it is not clear whether skin appearance alone can reveal deeper signs of aging.

“You really want to see if the skin biomarker is associated with other disease,” he said.

Barzilai, who works with centenarians, said he plans to submit photos of some of his subjects, ages 60 to 116, to the database.

James Kirkland, director of the Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that more important than estimating a person’s life span would be predicting his or her functional state, which Ricanek and Olshansky’s database will not do. But like many discoveries that end up contributing to science in unexpected ways, “it could be part of a pipeline that eventually results in something,” he said.

Potential for bias
 
Ethical and practical concerns may also arise, said Leonard Fleck, a professor of philosophy and medical ethics at Michigan State University.

Even if it can predict life span, the analysis might not be able to predict a person’s need for long-term care, he said. And it could open the door for discrimination.

“If at age 40 if there were something about your face saying you’re not likely to make it past 60, an employer could say, ‘Oh, I’m not willing to promote you to some position of importance because it’s not likely to be a good investment,’ ” Fleck said.

And people who look younger than their years do not always last long, said Mark Collins, president of the California-based Glenn Foundation, which funds aging research. “Sometimes people who look very healthy drop dead in the middle of the track, while others who look crinkled are still running at age 80,” he said.

Olshansky conceded that even if face aging is found to correlate with longevity, there will be outliers who don’t fit the general pattern.

“The longest-lived person in the world smoked for 100 years,” he said, adding that U.S. presidents, too, tend to be outliers, aging visibly faster in office but generally living longer than average.
However, he said, for the most part a face is a window onto a person’s overall health.

“The face picks up a lot of risk factors for health, such as tobacco smoking (wrinkles around the mouth); excessive alcohol consumption (larger nose); and excessive exposure to the sun (early brown spots and wrinkling) as well as stress,” he said in an e-mail.

At the very least, learning the results of one’s face-age analysis may nudge participants to try to extend their healthy life spans by adopting good habits.

“If someone came to you and said that your life expectancy, for example, is five years from now, you would think pretty hard and long about what’s going on in your life,” Ricanek said. “It can make us wake up and change some of the things that we’re doing — maybe we’re stressing out too much about our job; maybe we need to make different lifestyle decisions. I would like to shake people up.”