
Studies: Blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice - mking
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-hold-key-to-reversing-aging.html
======
User9821
How long would effects like this last? I mean, let's say a bunch of children
donated blood for the cause, and we used it to replace the blood of a senior
citizen.

I don't know how to phrase this properly, but how long does the blood maintain
the youthful qualities? Do you constantly need new blood coming in from a
young donor? Do you receive it once and you're good for a week? A year?

~~~
JetSpiegel
Only one way to find out...

~~~
User9821
It seems like it would be relatively easy to test out. People donate blood all
the time. I'm sure the effects are known of how much blood you can replace at
once without causing issues. Without a doubt some elderly people would
volunteer. Why can't we start giving them new blood once a week from donors,
and see the results on their health or illnesses? I'm all for testing, but
this seems like one of those things you could quickly move to human trials.

~~~
tormeh
Should be done outside the normal blood donor system. There's not that much
donor blood around, so it would be unethical to use it. Not a practical
problem, but it would look and feel bad.

Anyway, yes, why not try this on humans? Sounds perfectly reasonable.

~~~
sinaa
Because of cancer.

As mentioned in the article:

"Waking up stem cells might lead to their multiplying uncontrollably."

~~~
phazmatis
Scientists discover some weird thing they didn't expect, and start spitballing
about what the pros/cons could be when reporters show up. News at 11.

------
jdougan
As foreshadowed by Heinlein in Methuselah's Children...in 1958

"Yes, yes," agreed Hardy. "Naturally---but what is the basic process?" "It
consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with
new, young blood..."﻿

------
Tloewald
So... Elizabeth Bathory might have been on the right track? (Howard Hughes for
that matter.)

------
exratione
You have to be very careful when you say "reverses aging." That is a very
different thing from "reverses a couple of measurable aspects associated with
aging." In the former case you are making an assertion that will immediately
lead you to having to define the cause and mechanisms of aging and defend your
point that it is, as a process, reversed - and the definition of aging is a
contentious topic at the present time. But the press is lazy and in search of
clicks, etc, etc.

The mainstream of the aging research community theorizes on the basis of
mountainous evidence that aging is accumulated damage. What that damage
consists of is pretty much settled, but there is a lot of argumentation over
how it all hooks together, what is important, what is primary versus
secondary, and how in detail it connects to visible pathologies of aging.

Outside that mainstream, the present day accepted heresy, in the sense that
the minority population of heretics are engaged with rather than cast out of
the cathedral, is that aging is an evolved genetic program. It is a selected
adaptation and where there is damage that damage is a consequence of
epigenetic changes, not the cause of them. There are factions within this
heresy too, and a lot of argumentation. If you want to learn more, look for
the hyperfunction theory of aging and related thoughts as representative of
the field. [1]

The damage view of epigenetic and signaling changes in tissues that occur with
aging is that these changes are reactions to damage. Altering them may lead to
short term benefits and be worthy of use as treatments but that doesn't do
anything about the underlying damage - which will grow and kill you. In the
case of stem cell decline with aging, this process is thought to be a cancer
suppression mechanism, and thus forcing all the dormant stem cells back to
work is going to mean cancer everywhere. Equally it may turn out that
evolution has produced an overcompensation and some of the benefits of doing
this might be effectively free. The fastest way to find out is to conduct
animal studies in something other than mice (which are little cancer factories
and have telomere dynamics that are very dissimilar to that of humans).

In contrast the programmed aging view is that reversing signaling and
epigenetic changes is exactly reversal of aging, and is thus a great thing to
be doing and we should be making full steam ahead on this front. I think they
are wrong, and that the balance of evidence clearly points in the other
direction, but as I said this is a heresy with enough advocates that they are
not just ignored.

(Bizarrely, most of that portion of the mainstream who work towards enhancing
longevity and slowing aging actually spend their time on potential treatments
that make much more sense as goals for programmed aging enthusiasts. Look at
sirtuin or calorie restriction mimetic work - all about altering protein
levels and signals. All too few researchers take the sensible approach of
looking for means of damage repair. But that's a whole different topic. I
blame regulation of medicine as a force steering research into marginal
channels).

Anyway, on to the heterochronic parabiosis, which is what you call the linking
of circulatory systems in two individuals, one old, one young. This has been
used for some years as a way of studying what might be going on in old
tissues, especially in connection with the decline in stem cell tissue
maintenance activity that leads to organ dysfunction and death. The end goal
is to figure out the differences and use that knowledge to produce the part of
the complete map of the molecular biology of the progression of aging that
covers tissue signaling - most researchers in the field have no declared
interest in doing anything other than looking at what is going on.

Along the way, however, someone will produce prospective treatments based on
identifying signals to stem cells involved in the choice between activity and
quiescence. No-one is going to be shifting blood around as a basis for
treatments between young and old when you can instead figure out what exactly
it is in the blood that is causing changes - this is a change likely to occur
in the stem cell transplant field also, in which much of the benefits seem to
depend on the alteration of signals caused by the transplanted cells rather
than any cell maintenance they are doing directly. Why sling cells around if
you can just manufacture proteins that have the same beneficial effects?

One of the signals is apparently GDF11, which has been explored for a couple
of years now. [2] It is interesting to see that it is more general than simply
localized to heart tissue. Given the large number of quite different stem cell
populations in the body it would be unexpected to find much in the way of
commonality between the signaling systems that they use. Apparently there is
some commonality after all. Though I wouldn't hold out for much more. In
general I'm expecting the exploration of cell signaling to be every bit as
complicated as the hunt-and-peck approach taken to finding ways to interfere
with cancer: a lot of proteins, different in most tissues.

[1]:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3455862/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3455862/)

[2]:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.04.015](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.04.015)

~~~
Retric
Aging is more than just accumulated dammage, menopause is a clear counter
example to this idea. However, dammage does accumulate so like most complex
systems there are no simple answers.

~~~
exratione
Menopause is an oddity and a puzzle. It isn't easily used to support any of
the various points of view in aging research, partially because it is a human
peculiarity that doesn't seem to be present in anything like a similar form in
other primates or mammals. Theorizing has it linked with the grandmother
hypothesis viewpoint on why humans are so much longer lived than other
primates, and the evolutionary track by which we got here. You might look at
these papers:

[http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n2/full/100640.html](http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n2/full/100640.html)

[http://www.pnas.org/content/110/33/13440](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/33/13440)

~~~
waps
What ? This is not true at all. Menopause is present in all mammals. The
reason you don't see it in most mammals is simple : the normal maximum age for
most mammals is less than half of humans. Most animals grow to about 30-35
"dog-years", and die. Dogs and cats in captivity, some long-lived races, do
experience menopause. If humans died at 30-35, which is about the expected age
for humans in the natural habitat, it would be a very rare woman indeed that
experience menopause. (Keep in mind that 35 is the average age of death for
humans in nature. But at that age most deaths are still accidental, meaning
there is a large deviation. A lot of kids would "naturally" die 5 years or
younger (like 30-50%, depending on environment), then there is a certain
chance of dying every year. IF a human can avoid nature, infection, fights (or
you know, win them all), poisoning, famine, ... a male human would age to
about 40-45 years in nature, a woman a little older. But no more than 2% or so
will ever see their 45th birthday in a natural human population)

Here's the key, when a female baby takes her first breath (oxygen in the
lungs), a mechanism is set off that causes the ovi to cut off all connections
to the mother body. To put it simple: before a baby girl takes her first sip
of mother's milk, all the baby's children have become independent lifeforms,
no longer connected to the mother's body. The baby's DNA will sabotage and
boobytrap it's own ability to create new ovi at that point. This of course
means, among other things, that their numbers are 100% fixed at this point.
This means that at that point the number of fertility cycles her body will go
through is a constant from that point forward. There is a similar, but more
complex, process set off in men (in men, too, the cells that form the
reproductive cells are very isolated from the rest of the body).

When a human is disconnected from the umbilical, a number of changes happen as
a result of that in order to switch to what you might call internal power if
it were a robot. The immune system wakes up. The lungs inflate. The heart
starts actually pumping blood around (yes it beats in babies, but a baby would
survive without a beating heart as diffusion will actually happen fast enough.
This is really sad when it happens since the baby is alive at that point, but
growing will kill it). Cell reproduction rates are massively cut, and are
moving towards replacement-only (a 2 year old is -almost- no longer making
extra tissue. An adult is simply a 2 year old with "stretched" cells, not more
cells)

Essentially nature is trying to protect the next generation from DNA
alterations by external influences. Menopause is just a side-effect that
evolution doesn't care about because women are unlikely to have viable
children at that age.

------
cpdean
Details of the procedure: "To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching
together the skin on their flanks. After this procedure, called parabiosis,
blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. "

So the old and new rats were basically sewn together.

If you want to see what this looks like, here's a picture:
[http://www.viewzone.com/regen.miceduo.png](http://www.viewzone.com/regen.miceduo.png)

~~~
doxology
Yet another example of bad science (and it's cruel)... but it makes a great
headline, so let's run with it.

~~~
adlpz
How is this bad science? I cannot argue about the cruelty part, as that is a
completely subjective qualification (on which I don't agree at all), but if
this ends providing results that improve our scientific knowledge and the
lives of future generations, I don't believe it can be called _bad_ science.

------
swayvil
It's long been known that replacing the blood of an elderly person with that
of a youth will make the codger feel like a million bucks. It really does work
and, if I were a wealthy old guy, I would definitely have a stable of donors
on hand and get weekly treatments.

~~~
danieltillett
Do you have any links for this effect?

------
hbbio
It's been known for centuries that drinking blood of young...

Oh wait, that was a movie :)

~~~
bioinformatics
There is a Brazilian book for teens that has the story of a group of criminals
kidnapping children between 12-14 in order to harvest their blood. Of course,
it's more a satirical and comedic book, with the usual gang of boys and girls
solving the problem.

------
pistle
Tonight, we hunt. Tomorrow we bath in our re-found youth. It's a good time to
be past your prime.

------
scelerat
This has been well-known in the vampire community for centuries.

[edit]

More seriously, wow time to start talking about the ethics of immortality.

~~~
dang
Please don't post substanceless one-liners here.

The second one _sounds_ more serious, but "wow time to start talking about the
ethics of immortality" doesn't engage with anything in this article; it's
simply an immediate leap to something generic and obvious. That is not what HN
discussions need.

~~~
riggins
_Please don 't post substanceless one-liners here._

i.e. don't make jokes.

I've wondered about this because I've done the same thing and gotten
downvoted. There's nothing about not making jokes in the guidelines.
Personally I like a little humor mixed with my HN.

Is there some unspoken guideline that HN is supposed to be humorless?

And on a semi-serious note, isn't mildly interesting that one of the most
common cultural myths (vampires) may have some scientific validity?

~~~
dang
scott_s made an insightful comment about this recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289).

HN isn't against humor per se. Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of
how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything;
with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to
optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff tends to get hammered.

There are other places to get lots of internet humor. HN is never going to be
one of those, not because people don't like to laugh, but because the
signal/noise problem is hard.

~~~
Retric
I do occasionally up vote posts that I find funny. I just down vote several
times that. The real issue is HN has an older audience which does not find
obvious one liners interesting.

