
Questionable “Young Blood” Transfusions Offered in U.S. As Anti-Aging Remedy - bootload
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603242/questionable-young-blood-transfusions-offered-in-us-as-anti-aging-remedy
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alexmingoia
Is it typical for clinical trials to charge participants thousands of dollars?
For something as simple as an IV transfusion?

It seems like the clinical trial is just an excuse to get around medical
regulations, so they can sell snake oil to gullible rich people.

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pmiller2
Clinical trials typically pay the subjects, not the other way around.

OTOH, I'm not sure what medical regulations they'd be getting around.

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bitwize
Young blood as an anti-aging remedy for the rich? Why do I imagine it being
sipped from golden goblets in darkened castle halls?

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withdavidli
Daybreakers.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreakers)

People are vampires farming the remaining humans for their blood.

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Cyph0n
What. How have I not heard of this? Watching it tonight, thanks.

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hprotagonist
Great! It doesn't work (, and the original study
([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/abs/nature03...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/abs/nature03260.html))
never said it did.

Parabiosis seems to work because you're basically using the young mouse as a
breathing dialysis unit for the older mouse, not because there's any secret
sauce in their blood per se.

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imaginenore
Your claim ("it doesn't work") requires evidence, which you haven't presented.

The evidence that it does work already exists:

 _" When Wyss-Coray’s team tried a simpler experiment than parabiosis—giving
old mice injections of plasma from young mice—they saw similar effects on the
hippocampal neurons. The old mice also performed significantly better than
untreated animals on tests of learning and memory."_

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/young-blood-renews-
ol...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/young-blood-renews-old-mice)

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chadgeidel
That's not how science works. The onus isn't on someone to "prove it doesn't
work" \- the onus is on the person making the claim that it does work.

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imaginenore
Whoever makes the claim, has to present the evidence. If I claim your brain
doesn't work, it's not your job to prove me wrong.

Science (natual ones) can't prove anything, only disprove the hypothesis.

Science's default position is "we don't know" or "there's no evidence", not
"it doesn't work".

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pharrlax
Science's default position -- the null hypothesis -- is that there is no
relationship between two phenomena.

In this case, the phenomena are "administering treatment" and "seeing positive
results".

If the null hypothesis is accurate, and there is no relationship between
treatment and outcomes, then it doesn't work. So yes, that is indeed science's
default position.

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imaginenore
No, in this case, the phenomena are "administering treatment" and "seeing
results" (not just positive). You start off with "we don't know if it makes
humans better or worse or does absolutely nothing, let's do a bunch of tests".
Also, when it comes to clinical tests, you almost never do simply
control/placebo vs treatment. There are usually a few groups with various
degrees of treatment.

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JshWright
No, you start off with "we assume it does nothing".

"Clinical tests" is a wide range of studies, and initially may indeed be
'simple' placebo controlled studies. If an effect is seen, then testing will
be done with 'various degrees' to determine a dose response, etc.

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imaginenore
If it's found to work well, it will be great for the young people struggling
with money. The bar to entry of such a business is very low - you just have to
test the blood donors for disease, which can be outsourced to numerous labs.

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tossedaway334
Maybe there is a startup opportunity to sell spare kidneys, and even lungs and
liver-halfs too! Maybe even a cash-for-corpses business, we need to get rid of
these ridiculous self-serving medical regulations. DISRUPT!

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hughes
When you can grow back your kidneys, lungs, and livers, this will be a
sensible extension of the idea.

I initially wanted to make this comment sarcastically, but really, if we
become capable of regrowing organs within your body you could legitimately
make a business case for it.

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barry-cotter
Liver tissue does grow back

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplantation#Living_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplantation#Living_donor_transplantation)

In a typical adult recipient LDLT, 55 to 70% of the liver (the right lobe) is
removed from a healthy living donor. The donor's liver will regenerate
approaching 100% function within 4–6 weeks, and will almost reach full
volumetric size with recapitulation of the normal structure soon thereafter.
It may be possible to remove up to 70% of the liver from a healthy living
donor without harm in most cases. The transplanted portion will reach full
function and the appropriate size in the recipient as well, although it will
take longer than for the donor.

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reasonattlm
This popular science piece is characteristic of a prevalent and hostile view
of the growing practice of patient-funded clinical trials. In this model the
patient pays a sizable portion of the costs, which certainly makes it a lot
easier to gather larger amounts of data, as the trial organizers don't have to
seek the funding themselves. On the other hand, it tends to rule out the
ability to carry out a blind trial in which not everyone actually gets the
treatment, as well as other similar refinements. That is a problem if the goal
is to search for and quantify marginal effects, but if the point is to
discover or rule out large effects, I'd argue that control groups are not
necessary. The control in that case is the established progression for
patients who do not get the treatment, or who undergo existing, marginal
treatments. We are at the stage in the development of medicine to treat aging
in which marginal effects, such as those resulting from the use of metformin
as a calorie restriction mimetic, should be discarded as uninteresting. Once
at the stage of trying things in human studies, the research community should
be filtering for significant effects, such as those obtained by clearance of
senescent cells. Given the poor state of funding for aging research in
general, methods that can pull in more resources to obtain more data should be
applauded.

In the case of the approach being trialed here by Ambrosia, I think our
expectations should be low, and the outcome I expect is for there to be no
significant benefit. The only ethical question worthy of consideration is
whether those involved then do the right thing: publish the data, shut up
shop, and move on to the next project - having done the good work of finding
out that there is no large effect here. Transfusions of young blood to old
individuals are not producing benefits in mice, and there is reason to think
that the beneficial outcomes observed in old mice due to parabiosis, the
linking of circulatory systems between an old and a young individual, are due
to factors or circumstances not replicated by periodic transfusion. It isn't
difficult to imagine that beneficial outcomes require the youthful system
reacting in a dynamic way to the presence of aged signals, for example, or -
as suggested by some researchers recently - that it is nothing more than a
consistently maintained dilution of problem signals in the aged environment.

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sirclueless
I wonder if you could run a paid study with a proper control group. Perhaps
have everyone pay to participate, administer the treatment to half of them,
and at the end of the study refund some amount of money (all? all + interest?)
to the ones who received a placebo. That way they've only donated their time.

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velodrome
Exercise, good nutrition, and low stress would probably do a lot more than
this treatment (if effective).

Telomeres, lifestyle, cancer, and aging:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/)

 _Better choice of diet and activities has great potential to reduce the rate
of telomere shortening or at least prevent excessive telomere attrition,
leading to delayed onset of age-associated diseases and increased lifespan._

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Apocryphon
Elizabeth Bathory, eat your heart out.

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krapp
She would have.

Or at least used it as a loofah.

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dv_dt
This sounds like a set-up for a horror movie.

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parshimers
"Oh, yes... Paleblood. Well, you've come to the right place."

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gwern
No control arm, placebo or otherwise? Talk about burying the lede.

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return0
Maybe if there weren't so many regulations and taboos in science, this trial
would be run a research institution instead of a private company.

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bootload
_" weren't so many regulations and taboos in science, this trial would be run
a research institution"_

Alternatively, maybe the idea pitched to research institutions was knocked
back as unethical or showed little scientific merit?

