Longitudinal assessment of health-span and pre-death morbidity in wild type Drosophila.

Longitudinal assessment of health-span and pre-death morbidity in wild type Drosophila. Aging (Albany NY). 2019 Mar 27;: Authors: Gaitanidis A, Dimitriadou A, Dowse H, Sanyal S, Duch C, Consoulas C Abstract The increase in human life expectancy is accompanied by age-related cognitive and motor disability, thus raising the demand for strategies toward healthy aging. This requires understanding the biology of normal aging and late-life functional phenotypes. Genetic model organisms, such as Drosophila melanogaster, can help identifying evolutionary conserved mechanisms underlying aging. Longitudinal assessment of motor performance of more than 1000 individual flies revealed age-related motor performance decline and specific late-life motor disabilities. This allows defining heath- and ill-span and scoring late-life quality of individual flies. As in mammals, including humans, onset, duration, severity, and progression dynamics of decline are heterogenic and characterized by both, progressive worsening and sudden late-life events. Flies either become increasingly incapacitated by accumulating disability over multiple days prior to death, or they escape disability until few hours prior to death. Both late-life trajectories converge into a terminal stage characterized by stereotypical signs of functional collapse and death within 3 hours. Drosophila can now be used to evaluate life prolonging manipulations in the context of late-life qual...
Source: Aging - Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Tags: Aging (Albany NY) Source Type: research