Enjoyment of Sexuality and Longevity in Late Midlife and Older Adults: The Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam.

Sexual well-being refers to the evaluation of one's sexuality. We examined the association of enjoyment of sexuality with longevity and the moderating role of perceived importance of sexuality in this association. In the population-based Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, the survival of initially 55-84-year-olds was followed during 27 years. Complete data were available for 1042 participants (45.3%). Analyses were adjusted for health-related and psychosocial covariates. 60% of the participants experienced their sexuality as enjoyable and 44% as important. Enjoyment of sexuality was weakly, positively associated with longevity (B[CI] = 0.29[-0.004;0.58]). Perceived importance modified this association: only in those who perceived sexuality as important, the association between enjoyment and longevity was statistically significant (B[CI] = 0.78[0.29;1.27]). Positive affect, functional limitations, emotional loneliness, self-rated health, sense of mastery and alcohol consumption accounted for 35% of the latter association. Interventions may target older adults who perceive sexuality as important but not enjoyable.

Senescence in tissue samples of humans with age-related diseases: A systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Higher numbers of senescent cells have been implicated in age-related disease pathologies. However, whether different diseases have different senescent phenotypes is unknown. Here we provide a systematic overview of the current available evidence of senescent cells in age-related diseases pathologies in humans and the markers currently used to detect senescence levels in humans. METHODS: PubMed, Web of Science and EMBASE were systematically searched from inception to the 29th of September 2019, using keywords related to 'senescence', 'age-related diseases' and 'biopsies'. RESULTS: In total 12,590 articles were retrieved of which 103 articles were included in this review. The role of senescence in age-related disease has been assessed in 9 different human organ system and 27 different age-related diseases of which heart (27/103) and the respiratory systems (18/103) are the most investigated. Overall, 27 different markers of senescence have been used to determine cellular senescence and the cell cycle regulator p16ink4a is most often used (23/27 age-related pathologies). CONCLUSION: This review demonstrates that a higher expression of senescence markers are observed within disease pathologies. However, not all markers to detect senescence have been assessed in all tissue types.