I wanted to compare my body mass, strength, lipid and hormone profile to the 28 year old experienced weight trainers studied in the NJM article I discussed earlier this week. I want to show that the conventional wisdom that aging causes a decline in muscle mass, increased obesity, a fall in testosterone, and an unfavorable alteration of blood lipids is not true. Aging research is flawed; it is not the aging process but the poor eating and lack of exercise that is responsible for the general decline we often see with aging.
this is the most convincing yet for evolutionary fitness / diet: at 70, he kicks the ass of 28 year olds.
While you’re still alive, you set up a profile page on the site, including text, pictures, and videos, and then after you croak the URL is released to your family or friends. You might, for instance, offer instructions for what to do about your ashes or how to interpret your will, or provide a list of your financial accounts and passwords, or just post a video telling everyone what you really think of them.
a desire to stick around by any means possible is old as sentience. this will greatly help the rapid adoption of total history.
Aubrey de Grey: 2018 was a fantastic year for rejuvenation biotechnology. The main thing that made it special was the explosive growth of the private-sector side of the field – the number of startup companies, the number of investors, and the scale of investment. 2 companies, AgeX Therapeutics and Unity Biotechnology, went public with 9-digit valuations, and a bunch of others are not far behind. Of course this has only been possible because of all the great progress that has been made in the actual science, but one can never predict when that slow, steady progress will reach “critical mass”.
within 3-5 years there will be a rapid shift in public expectation in longevity. The lab and clinical research will get to the point that experts will be willing to say radical longevity is achievable. Major media will then trumpet it. The public will then change their beliefs.
These strange tales hint at what was, until quite recently, an underappreciated facet of our nature. Humans, it seems, can hibernate. 2014-03-27: Using torpor to improve ER survival odds
We’ve always assumed that you can’t bring back the dead. But it’s a matter of when you pickle the cells
For a long time, there was no evidence that primates could hibernate. A species of Madagascan lemur was shown to practise regular bouts of torpor. “If you look at the lemur and look at us, we share 98% of our genes. It would be very strange if the tools of hibernation were all packed into that 2% difference.”
2 research groups had markers in the brains of rats which they used to identify the neurons that triggered torpor. They then just activated those neurons to turn on the torpor state. Torpor is a weaker version of suspended animation. However it is 2x as efficient as sleeping or resting.
In response to a series of 3.2-megahertz pulses, the rodents’ core body temperatures dropped by about 3°C. The mice cooled off by shifting body heat into their tails—a classic sign of torpor—and their heart rates and metabolisms slowed. By automatically delivering additional pulses of ultrasound when the animals’ body temperatures began to climb back up, the researchers could keep the mice in this torpid state for up to 24 hours. When they silenced the minispeakers, the mice returned to normal, apparently with no ill consequences.
If Becker’s right, current ER practices actually kill people — when you’re brought into the ER and you’re not breathing, the first thing they do is flood you with oxygen. But all that does is radically accelerate the speed at which your cells die.
In a series of experiments on earthworms, scientists have identified PHA-4, which plays a critical role in prolonging life without tapping into insulin-regulating neural pathways that also control the aging process.
I bet they are partying over at SENS. 2007-08-13: The baby boomers don’t want to die, like all prior generations. but unlike them, they have the financial means to massively fund anti-aging research like SENS. This is only the very beginning. 2008-01-09: I wonder whether CR is compatible with evolutionary fitness. 2008-05-26: Intrinsic Pluripotency
We show that extrinsic stimuli are dispensable for the derivation, propagation and pluripotency of ES cells. The discovery has major implications for large scale production of specialized cells, such as brain, heart muscle and insulin producing cells, for future therapeutic use.
Prematurely aged (shortened) telomeres appears to be a common feature of iPS cells created by current pluripotency protocols. However, the spontaneous appearance of lines that express sufficient telomerase activity to extend telomere length may allow the reversal of developmental aging in human cells for use in regenerative medicine.
Injecting pluripotent cells into your blood stream can reverse aging effects. 2013-09-18: Google used to say, cheekily, that making search faster times billions of users saves lives, so doing anti aging seems like the logical next step. I also like this because it couldn’t be further from all the web 2.0 incrementalist nonsense most startups limit themselves to. 2014-06-13: Stem cell pills
I started taking Stem Cell 100 back in 2011. It is $60 for a 1 month supply. There is now Stem Cell 100+ [$75 for a 1 month supply]. They added more ingredients and the testimonials are that it acts faster and is more powerful and more people have noticeable positive changes.
Let’s face it – any other syndrome that caused the sorts of effects that age does on our bodies would be considered a plague. But we’re used to it, and it happens to everyone, and it happens slowly. Does it have to be that way? The history of medicine is a refusal to play the cards that we’ve been dealt, and there’s no reason to stop now.
the age of an organism, or an organ like the brain, is not written in stone. It is malleable. You can move it in 1 direction or the other. It’s almost mythological that something in young organisms can maintain youthfulness, and it’s probably true.
children of centenarians, who have a good chance of becoming centenarians themselves, maintained their telomeres at a “youthful” level corresponding to 60 years of age — even when they became 80 or older. Centenarian offspring also maintained lower levels of markers for chronic inflammation.
Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.
Nearly 10 years of research showing that Rapamycin makes mice live up to 60% longer, scientists are trying it out as an anti-aging drug in dogs and humans. Researchers gave rapamycin to 16 dogs and imaged their hearts. “It started to function better. It started to look like a more youthful heart”. Those dogs took rapamycin for only 10 weeks.
The scientists identified that the metabolite NAD+, which is naturally present in every cell of our body, has a key role as a regulator in protein-to-protein interactions that control DNA repair. Treating mice with a NAD+ precursor, or “booster,” called NMN improved their cells’ ability to repair DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. “The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice, after just 1 week of treatment”. Human trials of NMN therapy will begin within 6 months. “This is the closest we are to a safe and effective anti-aging drug that’s perhaps only 3 to 5 years away from being on the market if the trials go well”
There is much to be optimistic about and the ideas proposed by SENS over 10 years ago and widely criticized are now being eagerly explored by researchers as it becomes ever more apparent that the aging processes are amenable to intervention. What was mocked just over 10 years ago is now becoming an accepted approach to treating age-related diseases as the result continue to mount up in support of a repair based approach to aging. However we still lack complete knowledge on several age-related damages to progress to clinical trials in humans.
Targeting multiple aging pathways has the potential to significantly reduce blood pressure and stress, while significantly increasing HDL Cholesterol levels and lung capacity. Targeting multiple critical aging pathways with a single dietary supplement is a novel alternative strategy to promote overall health.
“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans”. The US pet industry is a $72B-a-year market.
The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century. It’s going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”
Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”
The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data’”.
Aubrey De Grey discusses how all of the aspects of fighting the damage of aging have reached an investable stage. 10 years ago only stem cells were investable. Now companies have been formed to attempt to counter all of the types of aging damage.
George Church talks about reversing human aging and claims they made mice live 2x as long. Organ longevity has also been done successfully with entire mice. If the body still did not get rid of the substandard cells then work at Oisin Biotechnology and others would enable bad cells to be cleared. Oisin is extending the life of mice and has proven safety and improvement in monkeys. They will start human clinical trials in 2019. Rejuvenate Bio has 60 aging reversal gene therapies. They have mentioned but not yet published eye popping results in mice. They are testing aging reversal in dogs in 2018-2019. Human treatments could be available on a general basis by 2025.
There is increasing of pharmaceutical company engagement via disease-focused proof of concept trials. Curing all cancers would add 3.5 years to average human lifespan. If anti-aging could delay the start of aging disease from 50 or 60 by 20 or 30 years then this could be 10x better than curing cancer. $50b per year is spent on curing cancer. If medical research was allocated based upon potential impact then anti-aging should be at a funding level of $500 billion per year.
His anti aging regimen is to activate pathways to improve the body’s defenses against aging. He is testing NMN on human subjects. He describes NMN is fuel for sirtuins. NMN is related to NR. NR increases the levels of NAD. Sirtuins need NAD to work. We lose NAD as we age. We have half of the NAD by the time we are 50. He takes a gram of NMN (Nicotinamide MonoNucleotide) and takes half a gram resveratrol in the morning with yogurt. He is personally taking 1 gram of Metformin once a day at night.
the evidence as it stands weakly supports the conclusion that CR modestly extends human life. We expect that an individual engaging in 20-30% CR versus a normative, non-obesogenic diet without malnutrition might enjoy a 10%-20% increase in longevity. A 10%-15% CR relative to a normative diet may increase lifespan by perhaps 5-10%.
The treated cells appeared to be ~3 years younger on average than untreated cells from elderly people, with peaks of 3 years (in skin cells) and 7 years (in cells that line blood vessels).
Sinclair’s focus in on analog information loss, the epigenetic noise that accumulates in the methylation patterns running along our DNA and disturbing its expression. This degradation is a biological clock of aging, and today’s results “tell us the clock doesn’t just represent time—it is time. If you wind the hands of the clock back, time also goes backward.”
“Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression
2020-12-04: Most brain aging decline can be fixed overnight
Common signs of neuronal aging disappeared literally overnight: neurons’ electrical activity became more sprightly and responsive to stimulation, and cells showed more robust connectivity with cells around them while also showing an ability to form stable connections with one another usually only seen in younger mice.
Avian longevity may be linked to special adaptations in the biology of birds—including proteins to operate their highly efficient metabolisms and their remarkable ways of processing oxygen—that prevent tissue damage commonly associated with old age. In many animals, high body temperature, metabolic rates, and blood glucose levels indicate a shorter lifespan because these systems damage DNA in the mitochondria. But compared to other animals, birds are very good at protecting their mitochondrial DNA from the cellular damage associated with aging, which could contribute to their extensive lifespans. Studying birds could enhance our understanding of aging in humans, too, leading to advances in human health. “We want to know how nature has constructed things that resist aging better than we do. Otherwise, we’re left to our own ingenuity.”
2023-01-29: Epigenetic clocks have become more accurate and more universal
“A pan-tissue clock was paradoxical because methylation is supposed to control cell identity,” and remains fixed through adulthood. When Horvath and his colleagues established that epigenetic clocks counted time at the same pace across all tissues, whether that was quickly dividing blood cells or notoriously slow and highly differentiated brain neurons, the race was on to understand the fabric of time that the clocks are measuring. The universal clock, the key finding of Horvath’s 2022 paper, takes the pan-tissue clock one step further. It chimed the final stroke that unequivocally showed a predictable pattern to aging not only within the body of a single organism, but across mammals. These are clocks that hopefully are comprised of cytosines that truly have a causative role in the aging process. Of particular interest are “enhancer” regions of the genome, which exaggerate the role of certain genes by activating them to exorbitant levels.
the point at which, each year, the average human life expectancy increases by at least 1 year. This makes actuarial escape velocity an attractive idea, as a means of achieving indefinite lifespan.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 