Early breast cancer patients with a natural humoral response to MUC1 have a higher probability of freedom from distant failure and a better disease-specific survival. MUC1 antibodies may control hematogenic tumor dissemination and outgrowth by aiding the destruction of circulating or seeded MUC1-expressing tumor cells. Vaccination of breast cancer patients with MUC1-derived (glyco)peptides in an adjuvant setting may favorably influence the outcome of disease.

The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) is a prospective cohort study of older adults in the Netherlands, initially based on a nationally representative sample of people aged 55-84 years. The study has been ongoing since 1992, and focuses on the determinants, trajectories and consequences of physical, cognitive, emotional and social functioning. Strengths of the LASA study include its multidisciplinary character, the availability of over 25 years of follow-up, and the cohort-sequential design that allows investigations of longitudinal changes, cohort differences and time trends in functioning. The findings from LASA have been reported in over 600 publications so far (see www.lasa-vu.nl). This article provides an update of the design of the LASA study and its methods, on the basis of recent developments. We describe additional data collections, such as additional nine-monthly measurements in-between the regular three-yearly waves that have been conducted among the oldest old during 2016-2019, and the inclusion of a cohort of older Turkish and Moroccan migrants.

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In this study, the impact of two perceptual factors, feature similarity and spacing, on age-related differences in performance and psychophysiological measures were investigated within a focused attention paradigm. Young and old subjects performed an Eriksen letter identification task, in which centrally presented targets were flanked by response-compatible or response-incompatible letters. In feature similarity conditions, targets and flankers had a low or high amount of feature overlap. In spacing conditions, flankers were presented at four different lateral positions from the target. In the condition with high feature overlap and shortest target-flanker distance, old subjects showed greater interference by incompatible flankers than young subjects. Feature similarity was of little influence on age-related differences. However, spacing turned out to be of critical importance. Age-related interference effects disappeared when the target-flanker distance increased. This appears to be due to a decrease in response competition.

Many older adults age relatively successfully, but the character of successful functioning over time varies between indicators, and the combinations of successful indicators vary between individuals.