Jennifer Garrison, a 49-year-old neuroscientist, has been studying how aging changes the way the brain communicates with the rest of the body in a lab she runs in Novato, Calif.
But on an afternoon in March, she walked across a glitzy Los Angeles stage to the pulsing soundtrack of Kelly Clarkson singing, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and greeted an audience of mainly high net-worth men gathered to hear about tech and longevity.
“What if I told you that understanding female bodies could actually help every single person on the planet live healthier longer?” she asked.
Garrison then directed the audience to watch a movie of a 3-D structure on a large screen behind her. She asked everyone to guess what it was. A brain, a heart, a liver, a thyroid, a stomach, people called out. No, no, no, no and no. “This is an ovary,” Garrison told them. She later added: “We call them the canary in the coal mine of aging.”
Jamie Justice, a gerontologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, says that an important predictor of longevity in both females and males is the age at which their mothers go through menopause, defined as a year without a menstrual cycle, which women experience on average at the age of 51.
If a mother goes through menopause late, she is more likely to live longer. So are her daughters, sons and brothers. Scientists say that there are common genes involved, but they don’t yet know all of them.
“If we understand what is happening, we can unlock secrets about biological aging in women and in men,” said Justice.
Read the full story: Step Aside Longevity Bros. It’s Time for the Longevity Ladies. (WSJ)