Aging Matters
Abating Risk of AD Dementia seems to appear out of nowhere. People feel like helpless victims of their genes. But this is a misconception. How much does the dreaded ApoE4 gene increase your chance of getting dementia? This is not a straightforward calculation precisely because the correlation must be controlled for many diet and lifestyle … Read more
Writing this blog has introduced me to a community (that’s you) with which I have shared a great deal of information, and from which I have learned more. You have become dear to me. Now I’ve been away for many weeks, away from my home (Philadelphia) and away from this blog. I’ve been in California … Read more
We have come to expect that clinical trials require thousands of participants, tracked over years or decades. Even for measures of clear long-term value like exercise and vitamin D, the trends have to be wrenched from the scatter with statistical vicegrips. The message in this situation is that individual responses to any intervention vary widely, … Read more
A game-changing result this week from the laboratory of Dario Valenzano (Max Planck Inst). A single treatment of antibiotics in middle-aged fish followed by transplant of gut bacteria from young fish resulted in extension of mean lifespan by 41%, max lifespan by 30%. Treated fish remained active at ages where untreated fish were slowing down. … Read more
I am finishing a four-day fast today. In the hope of synergizing senolytic modalities, I took 2.5 g of quercetin last night and another 2.5 g this morning. I don’t take quercetin regularly, because studies in mice show that daily administration doesn’t lengthen lifespan, and may shorten it. But for the present, quercetin is the … Read more
Aging at the cellular level is called “cell senescence”, and it contributes profoundly to whole-body aging. The most promising near-term prospects for a leap in human life expectancy come from drugs that eliminate senescent cells. Programs in universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world are racing to develop “senolytic” drugs, defined as agents that can … Read more
Yes, there are too many reports the last few years of people announcing the end of aging. But this, I feel, is the first time a drug has been discovered that has the potential to extend our lives by decades, with a few injections. Background: As we get older, some of our cells become ‘senescent’. … Read more
Human Ageing Genomic Resources announced last week their on-line database of animal studies that evaluated drugs and supplements for extended lifespan. HAGR is a project of the University of Liverpool, spearheaded by João Pedro de Magalhaes, who has been an activist-scientist in aging research since his days as a grad student at Harvard. The database … Read more
At different times, I have written about 8 different anti-inflammatory supplements, including aspirin, ibuprofen, omega 3 oils, curcumin, berberine, resveratrol, ashwaghanda, and boswellia, in addition to eating foods such as ginger, rosemary, tea and several mushroom species with anti-inflammatory effects. There is good evidence for benefits from each of these individually, but I have no … Read more
I was glad to see Valter Longo’s Fasting-Mimicking diet in the news again this week. I have been enthusiastic about Longo’s work ever since he documented altruistic suicide of yeast cells for his PhD thesis in the 1990s. Programmed death in one-celled protists was considered an affront to evolutionary theory at the time, and he … Read more