"Even if we don't affect when you die, we'd like to make you fully functional up to the day you die," he said. Rather, he sees it as a way to improve people's quality of life when they are reaching the end and potentially save immense amounts of money in end-of-life health care. Mueller said the research isn't about stopping or even delaying death. According to, a website of the Wellcome Genome Campus, 75 percent of disease-causing genes in humans are also present in fruit flies. Using that knowledge, researchers could look at the human genome for similar genetic markers humans are genetically similar to fruit flies, Mueller noted. "Once you create populations that are genetically different in that way, you can ask, 'What genes were changed in order to reduce the length of the death spiral?'" Mueller said. Humans are challenging study subjects for both ethical and biological reasons, but looking at the death spiral in other organisms could give scientists a window into how this works in humans, the researchers said.Īccording to Mueller, the next step in this research might be to selectively breed the flies to create groups that experience death spirals of different durations. The assessments included measures of grip strength, ability to complete daily activities (such as using the toilet and eating) and exams that helped evaluate cognitive impairment.īasically, Mueller said, a death spiral in people could be the reason we often see a distinct increase in disability just before a person dies. They found that the physical and cognitive scores of individuals who died within the first two years of the study were significantly lower than the scores of those who were still alive in 2005. In that study, researchers analyzed data collected on the physical and cognitive abilities of 2,262 Danish people, ages 92 to 100, from 1998 to 2005. In their review paper, Mueller and his colleagues cited a study from 2008 published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesas evidence that people may experience the death spiral as well. The hope is that death-spiral research in fruit flies and other organisms could someday tell scientists more about the decline of humans prior to death. The research, published online March 22 in the journal Scientific Reports, concluded that this intestinal leakiness was a marker of death in all three species. However, the company chooses to lower all its overhead costs by cutting down on the volume of production of goods or services that it offers its customers. If permeability increased, that dye would leak out into the animal's body, and its body would change color - blue in the flies and fish, and fluorescent green in the nematodes. Death spiral economics is a situation where an entity finds itself trapped in specific problems that arise due to a non-stop rise in fixed costs. The researchers tested this leakiness, called permeability, by feeding food dye to each animal. In another study, scientists observed fruit flies, nematodes and zebrafish, to see if their intestines exhibited increased leakiness before death.
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