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TODAY IS “ALL SOULS DAY”

[By staff reporters]

All Souls Day is a holy day set aside for honoring the dead. The day is primarily celebrated in the Catholic Church, but it is also celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and a few other denominations of Christianity. The Anglican church is the largest protestant church to celebrate the holy day.

Most protestant denominations do not recognize the holiday and disagree with the theology behind it.

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So – When are you going to die?

By MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Humans have been trying to find ways to calculate exactly how long they’ll live since time immemorial. We’re yet to find a reliable predictive formula, but that is starting to change.

The science: Certain chemical changes to cytosine – one of the four DNA bases or “letters” of genetic code—can help tell whether someone’s body is aging unusually fast or slowly. Steve Horvath, a biostatistician at UCLA, tested this “epigenetic clock” theory on 13,000 blood samples collected decades ago, from people whose subsequent date of death was known. The results found that the clock can be used to predict how long someone will live and how much of that life will be free of age-related disease.

Inheritance: Your genes dictate about 40% of the “ticking rate” of your mortality clock, while the rest comes down to lifestyle and luck, according to Horvath. There are things we can do to delay aging —including getting enough sleep.

Privacy: Insurance companies, hospitals and palliative care teams are already finding this sort of research useful, but there are a lot of issues around privacy yet to be untangled. Your likely life span is information we’d consider very personal, yet existing regulations and privacy policies don’t even consider the possibility of such information. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking about it.

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“DANCE OF DEATH”

[Copyright 2018. iMBA Inc., all rights reserved. USA]

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Conclusion

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Filed under: Ethics, LifeStyle, Retirement and Benefits | Tagged: When are you going to die? |