I am not trying to diminish the work being reported on here. I just want to comment that I see these kinds of articles posted frequently, and they always leave me feeling like
Experimental "foo" results in NN% improvement in "quux" in new study. Possible human trials scheduled for "someday far far away" and could "one day" lead to rainbow colored pet unicorns for all humans.
Basically, some amazing thing may happen someday and I'll never hear about it and will likely be dead and gone well before it bears fruit.
It would be wonderful if there was a site that summarized these kinds of breakthrough research projects in a way that was practical for laypeople. E.g. disease, research being done, possible treatment/cure, stage of testing, availability to general public / how to get it or become part of trial group, cost, risks etc. E.g. I'd love to be able to star & watch this like a Github repo and be notified of progress...
I feel this way too, but I often find those circulating articles are in mainstream media by people who don't understand what they're reporting on or in "science will cure everything" blogs. However, this is a summary posted on one of the most respected journals in the world's website. The article/study it is summarizing was peer reviewed and developed by scientists at some of the world's top institutions. Sure, we shouldn't get caught up in reputation as a marker of quality, but at the same time it does count for something... this is not the same as most of the breathless articles that I see circulate on social media.
I didn't feel like the comment was arguing about the quality of the articles, but more the notion of how reading an article about some point in time progress of some early thing feels useless: what you want is to follow the thing. It is like if you hear about some new piece of software when it is just some proof of concept and it won't be a "real thing" for three years but you want to follow it so you can keep learning about it and watch its progress... so you watch its git repository or subscribe to its mailing list or whatever, and you can do that; but with science, the process--which at the milestones of publishing feels very open--is usually some weird closed competitive process.
Very interesting research in that book but honestly, very little actionable paths for the reader. We aren't yet to a point where it's possible to just pop a pill and live another 100 years. Probably the most effective thing you can do right now is caloric restriction, but that can kind of suck. The holy grail would be some way to eat normally, and slow the aging process.
There are several ideas about why caloric restriction might be working. There was one study that implicated human growth hormone in combination with zinc, dhea, vitamin d, and burberine in telomeres lengthening. Human growth hormone is produced in response to ghrelin, which is released when we are hungry. So it might be that it is the hunger, not the lack of food that slows aging.
If that is true, then it infers that simply being hungry could extend life.
Some compounds promote hunger, notably THC found in marijuana. Yet, as far as I know, chronic marijuana users are not living substantially longer lives? Then again, the hunger effect probably also diminishes as ones tolerance increases.
Intermittent fasting with a total calorie intake that is breakeven is probably the safest way to boost hgh, some weightlifters do this already. Others use ibutemoren which is a sectagogue for ghrelin to indirectly boost hgh
Skip meals, live in a calorie deficit, take resveratrol, try to reduce inflammation, exercise, sort sleep, are the ones I can remember off my head. Also eat a massive amount of broccoli sprouts.
Yes, these are the steps. I'll expand on one as well:
> try to reduce inflammation
Avoid the obvious things (alcohol, drugs) but also your diet has a huge effect on systemic inflammation. It's one theory as to why caloric restriction works. Simply eating less, means less inflammation.
But WHAT you eat also matters. As it turns out, SUGAR is highly inflammatory. To a lesser extent, complex carbohydrates are too.
So if you're really interested in longevity consider not just eating less, but eating less sugar (and by extension, carbohydrates).
If you ask me that sucks. Part of living life, is enjoying good food. And as it happens, a lot of good food is full of fat and sugar. I moderate and I don't eat a lot of it, but to think I would need to basically cut all of it out just to live another frail 10 years doesn't seem worth it to me.
Which sort of indicates that it is not young blood per se that plays the important role, but dilution and removal of "something" that accumulates with age.
Albumin is expensive, at least so far, no one thought about an industrial method to produce large quantities, because there was no demand for them. Aside from price, no ethical problems there.
Also, frequent blood donors tend to be much more healthy. A study from Kuopio, Finland, showed that they are almost immune to heart attacks:
Ofc, the question of causality is strong here, no doubt. But maybe - if the body of a blood donor is forced to produce new blood frequently, might this new blood be "healthier" or "younger" in some sense.
There is a hypothesis that excess iron is a risk factor for heart attack, and that periodic blood loss clears it out. This could be why pre-menopausal women have lower rates of heart attack than men and post-menopausal women, even after adjusting for age and other factors.
A good occasion to remind everyone to consider donating blood, especially now - most places are pretty low on blood transfusions currently because of the pandemic. Varies by country of course but if you are healthy and it's possible where you live you can help a lot!
Even if one wanted to donate right now, aren't we supposed to be limiting our exposure to other people as COVID surges?
I'm probably too cautious of a person but I tend to not trust other people to exercise appropriate caution themselves. Intimate proximity to a nurse taking blood, seems like a bad idea right now.
For men and postmenopausal women that could just be dumping excess iron to avoid organ damage. If the albumin had similar results for regular blood donors and premenopausal women, maybe we need albumin.
I have a relative that went blind due to double corneal tear. Every time one of these articles comes up, they forward me the link and ask whether that's something they could use. Of course, I always have to be the one giving the bad news.
I rarely see any of those articles materialize in a way where I could say "yes, this is something I can get right now". The only one I remember actually making it is the Argus II, and even then there is no way I could afford the $150K price.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think it's actually as gloomy as that. Those kinds of articles help keep science in the news, which in turn keeps people interested in science, which hopefully leads to people considering careers in science.
Maybe these things bear fruit, maybe they don't, but at least now we know about them, and maybe it'll inspire someone somewhere.
is this why big–pharma harvest blue bloods? i'm not sure i believe this hoopla about the tree of life.
but i'm interested in the biomedical applications from obscure species that feature bioluminescence, magic pheromones and how to test the quality of Eel I just put on back order.
i loved your italicized block. don't down vote this one.
Affiliations
Department of Genetics, Blavatnik Institute, Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Yuancheng Lu, Xiao Tian, Daniel L. Vera, Qiurui Zeng, Doudou Yu, Michael S. Bonkowski, Jae-Hyun Yang, Michael B. Schultz, Alice E. Kane, Karolina Chwalek, Luis A. Rajman & David A. Sinclair
Department of Neurology, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Benedikt Brommer, Chen Wang, Songlin Zhou & Zhigang He
Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Benedikt Brommer, Anitha Krishnan, Chen Wang, Songlin Zhou, Emma M. Hoffmann, Margarete M. Karg, Ekaterina Korobkina, Meredith S. Gregory-Ksander, Bruce R. Ksander & Zhigang He
Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Anitha Krishnan, Emma M. Hoffmann, Margarete M. Karg, Ekaterina Korobkina, Meredith S. Gregory-Ksander & Bruce R. Ksander
Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Margarita Meer & Vadim N. Gladyshev
Department of Pathology, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
Margarita Meer & Morgan E. Levine
Department of Genetics, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA
Noah Davidsohn & George M. Church
Department of Molecular Biology, Cancer Center and Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Konrad Hochedlinger
Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Steve Horvath
Laboratory for Ageing Research, Department of Pharmacology, School of Medical Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
David A. Sinclair
I would love something like this. Over the past 5 years I have experienced my eyesight degrade since reaching 40 years old. I always use to quietly brag to myself about having such good vision. And then suddenly it gets a little bit of challenge to read, so you get a weak strain of reading glasses and from their you continue up in strengh ratings until you realise the person over the road from you has a blurred face and you have gone from needing reading glasses to needing glasses all of the time.
Since we're commiserating: the vergence of my eyes is failing and I'm not even 40. My actual vision is perfect; better than ever. But apparently my eyes don't converge so well anymore, giving me horrific headaches if I look at any kind of screen for more than a few minutes :( Really sucks. Doc gave me prism lens so I can use a computer again, but they're exhausting to use. Hoping I can find a specialist after the pandemic is over and figure out a better option; really don't want this to get worse.
Kind of sick joke, considering I spent almost a decade of my career doing computational imaging and computer vision work.
I had something like that and doing a few minutes a day of magic eye / 3d stereograms sessions helped me a lot. That consisted of learninng how to see them then learning to hold the image up in 3D (feels like starring behind the image) then rotating the eyes around while holding the stereogram in focus (looking at all parts of the image not just center). This helped strenghten my eye muscles and tension/headaches went away.
I printed out a Presbyopia chart (http://www.robert-silverman.net/presbeninst.htm) that was linked on HN awhile back and started using a Brock string. Figured I'd do those until the pandemic is over and I can get some professional vision therapy.
Guess I'll pick up a magic eye poster too. At least it'll be more fun than staring at a string for five minutes.
There are tons of magic eye available as images online. Not all magic eye images are equal and beware they all have different depths and some are more visible and pop up faster than others. Some are particularly pleasant to stare at.
Btw, there is even a magic eye tetris out there. Playable only when one is proficient at seeing magic eye images.
Very interesting presentation, thank you for the link. I'll have to look and see if they've made progress since then; something I can try at home perhaps.
Wonder if a VR headset with a custom interpupillary distance (IPD) would work for you? eg set it to a distance that's not physically correct, but er... more correct for how your eyes operate.
If it's works, you'd be able to read text again. You'd just need to do it from inside VR. ;)
How did you know it was that? I've had a quite sudden change in vision (I used to be able to read without glasses or function daily without glasses, and in a matter of weeks or months I suddenly needed glasses all day, I'm 37) and it seems my astigmatism progressed, but not that much since before.
I also had quite bad posture during the confinement and wonder if I could have pinched a nerve?
I'll definitely have my doctor take a look. Thank you. It's so hard to find information about possible causes for convergence insufficiency. All my Google diggings have come up with the usual information about treating it in children :/
Your eye has "extra flexibility" to focus at birth (that is, it can focus beyond infinity and nearer than is useful), but it slowly hardens and becomes less flexible. Around age 40-50 is when you really start to notice the loss in range, assuming you had something close to a normal balance between distance and near vision to begin with.
I am 42 and I started experimenting with NMN, NR and resveratrol in January.
My eyesight measurably improved, by about 1,25 dp, within weeks (I am shortsighted since childhood.) I no longer notice any eye strain even after looking into screens for hours. My very, very mild presbyopia disappeared. Also, I believe that I can see colors much more brightly, but this is something that cannot be measured easily, if at all.
I don't believe so. It's my understanding that the protein structures that make the lens so flexible-- mostly alpha-crystallin --- are created during the development of the eye and slowly lost over time.
Later, transparency is lost in the cornea for similar reasons and we get cataracts.
Then with cataract surgery you can choose your preferred focal length for your new stiff artificial lens.
I doubt that that's a key factor. There's a lot of luck on initial refractive error, etc.
I don't need reading glasses. One reason is I have one eye with a slightly near refractive error and one with a slightly far refractive error. They're also both pretty close to nominal, so losing a bit of range on focusing doesn't hurt as much as if I'd been biased one way or another.
I do notice that I prefer slightly larger text than before. I bet if I tried reading glasses that I'd find that they lend some benefit.
I notice that after a long hike in the mountains, I can see a bit better. The effect stays for several hours.
Probably the eyes need some training too, refocusing onto near and far objects frequently. We live in a computer screen world, this is very unnatural for our eyes.
Is there an incentive to perform peer-reviewed, triple-blind, controlled studies on people to see if diet and exercise helps? Then there's no way to know.
Precisely same here most noticeable on screens and in morning. My wife passed me her glasses and my screen became sharper than ever. My fear is using them too much might then mess up my non glasses vision.
Probably not. Age-related near vision loss is due to the lens of your eye losing flexibility with age, and not being able to change shape as much to focus on near things, and not any kind of baseline refractive error.
Nobody I’ve met is aging the way Mark is aging. He looks... weird. Either he is a potential medical paper, or he’s doing something. Or he’s been replaced by a robot.
Not imortal, but probably billionaires will be the first to get longer lifespans (250 years). Imagine how much powerful someone can become. There is a very nice book called Pandora’s Star where people live for a very long time and this causes a lot of interesting developments in society.
That's interesting ... I've had vision problems (been partially blind out of one eye for years, and my vision often wants to go double), and no one's been able to pin point a cause. Keep getting hand-wavey responses like "it's just your migraines".
How did you discover you had increased cranial pressure?
Several research groups and companies are working on in vivo applications of cellular reprogramming. Since its discovery, reprogramming has been used to produce induced pluripotent stem cells from any other type of cell. That process has been found to reverse age-related changes in epigenetic patterns and mitochondrial function characteristic of cells in old tissues.
Introducing the factors capable of reprogramming cells into a living animal may produce effects akin to stem cell therapy by converting a small number of cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, followed by stem cell signaling that beneficially affects tissue health more broadly. Alternatively, many cells may have their epigenetic markers reset to a more youthful state without losing their identity to become induced pluripotent stem cells. Or both. Beyond this, there is certainly the threat of cancer or structural damage to tissue through the conversion of too many cells, and this class of therapy will require careful development to ensure safety, even as the mouse data continues to look quite interesting.
David Sinclair has been pushing an epigenetic-centric view of aging of late, with analogies to information systems and computing. The most interesting part of the the supporting work suggests that DNA repair of double strand breaks has the side-effect of driving alteration of the epigenome in characteristic ways with age. That will be an important connection between stochastic nuclear DNA damage and deterministic global effects throughout the body, should the evidence continue to hold up.
As this illustrates, however, epigenetic change is a downstream issue in aging, a reaction to events and a changing environment, not a first cause. Fixing it may or may not turn out to be particularly useful in the broader picture of aging, depending on exactly where it sits in the web of cause and consequence. As a comparable example, hypertension is a major downstream issue in aging. It is far removed from root causes such as cross-link formation and inflammation, but is also a proximate cause of many forms of further dysfunction, such as pressure damage to delicate tissues in the brain. Controlling hypertension without addressing its causes is both possible and beneficial - but the benefits are limited by the fact that those root causes are still there, chewing away at the body in a thousand other ways.
The eye was selected as the area for this research because it is self-contained in multiple ways. Viruses used to insert the OSK genes in they eye will stay in the eye, so there is less concern about possible effects elsewhere in the body. That provides an easier path towards translating and getting regulatory approval in humans.
But the very cool thing is there is no reason to believe that this technique couldn't eventually be used throughout the whole body.
UNR844-Cl claims to restore flexibility to the aging lens by breaking the disulfide bonds that form between proteins in the lens. It's a really simple molecule too, composed of common supplements(lipoic acid and choline), so it looks like the risk is fairly low.
I've been following this drug's development process since back when it was named EV06.
Currently people with presbyopia who get laser eye surgery have one eye corrected for looking at nearby objects and the other for those which are far away - this works, but is not ideal.
With UNR844 one could potentially have the same typeof correction in both eyes.
I was just listening to some techniques on YouTube on how to fix presbyopia by switching to older prescriptions from current prescriptions to bring back the elasticity. Apparently focusing on reading or a computer screen too much can create the lens from returning to it's original condition/state as it remains locked/seized up. Might be bullshit but these eye drops would be amazing. I wonder if this is what David Sinclair was talking about when he said they will be able to fix bad vision soon.
I was confused at first because your link is about a different approach, using drugs that temporarily constrict the pupil. The drug that fixes the lens is in human trials too, and would also just be an eye drop. Here's an article:
I think one of the guys who founded Moderna originally wanted to inject mRNA to induce pluripotent stem cells. It would be great if that can somehow work for this. Instead of using an adenovirus to insert the genes, we can inject mRNA to induce expression of the transcription factors long enough for it to take effect.
This stuff could be BIG deal. Currently, most of therapies involve taking the cells out to reprogram them back to ipsc and trying to stuff them back again. IF this is viable in humans - adenoviruses work for us, too - or nanolipid vesicles. So, it should. Source: wife epigenetics postdoc in ipsc therapy
I’m really starting to hate this trope, I think everyone should just assume “in mice” unless the title states “in humans” as that is a much rarer event for research papers to be at that stage than mice or other mammals.
I just don’t think commenting with “in mice” on every biology papers adds to and informs the discussion. Maybe headline wars could be on a separate thread for each article?
I'd like to see what happens if all the youth renewal strategies done on laboratory mice are applied to older, wild-caught mice of whatever variety is closest to lab mice.
I've heard the claim when calorie limiting applied to wild mice, they ... just die - they already have limited calories.
Experimental "foo" results in NN% improvement in "quux" in new study. Possible human trials scheduled for "someday far far away" and could "one day" lead to rainbow colored pet unicorns for all humans.
Basically, some amazing thing may happen someday and I'll never hear about it and will likely be dead and gone well before it bears fruit.
It would be wonderful if there was a site that summarized these kinds of breakthrough research projects in a way that was practical for laypeople. E.g. disease, research being done, possible treatment/cure, stage of testing, availability to general public / how to get it or become part of trial group, cost, risks etc. E.g. I'd love to be able to star & watch this like a Github repo and be notified of progress...