Posted on 01/15/2017 7:05:24 AM PST by combat_boots
Treatment increased life spans of prematurely aging rodents
Magazine issue: Vol. 191, No. 1, January 21, 2017, p. 6
Four proteins that can transform adult cells into embryonic-like ones can also turn back the aging clock, a new study in mice suggests.
Partial reprogramming of cells within prematurely aging mice’s bodies extended the rodents’ average life span from 18 weeks to 24 weeks, researchers report December 15 in Cell. Normal mice saw benefits, too: Muscles and pancreas cells healed better in middle-aged mice that got rejuvenation treatments than in mice that did not. The experiment could be evidence that epigenetic marks — chemical tags on DNA and proteins that change with age, experience, disease and environmental exposures — are a driving factor of aging. Some marks accumulate with age while others are lost.
“It’s an inspiring paper,” says Jan van Deursen, a biologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who studies diseases of aging. He gives the paper an “A” for sparking imagination, but lower marks for practical applications to human aging because it would involve gene therapy and could be risky. “It’s all cool, but I don’t see that it could ever be applied in medicine,” he says. “We could be terribly wrong. Hopefully we are.” Researchers reset the mice’s aging clock by genetically engineering the animals to make four proteins when the rodents were treated with the antibiotic doxycycline. Those four proteins — Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc — are known as “Yamanaka factors” after Shinya Yamanaka. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist demonstrated in 2006 that the proteins could turn an adult cell into an embryonic-like cell known as an induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS cell (SN: 11/3/12, p. 13; SN: 7/14/07, p. 29).
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Great news for mice.
Great. Just what we need - long living rodents.
I want to test it.
Since the elites are looking into living as long as they can, I would like to be able to tap into this “Highlander” science myself.
Looks like it is going to be a close race for us old codgers.
Question for FReepers:
If we were able to significantly extend lifespan except for catastrophic accidents, would people avoid risky behavior?
All four proteins are found in rare steak. :^)
I think we already have our answer on that with the explosion of comunical diseases and their knowledge of them with the hope that abortion, antibiotics or medication can hold them off long enough for a cure.
Personally, I embrace the aging process eventhough I’m only 38. My body has been destroyed from racing Motocross and other bad choices. My Dr said my joint condition is that of a 60 year old and will be in chronic pain for the rest of my years, but it still doesnt deter me from working 40-80 hours a week. Eternal life can only be given to me from the lord, until then, I will be the best possible person I can be and view “life” as the first step to a greater end.
Hope that made sense, just got off work and had a few glasses of wine (smile face)
I’vw written a grant proposal to study how to teach mice to avoid mousetraps because, I’m very proud to say, I’ve very cleverly noticed grant money flows like crazy to studies designed to help mice. High five, bro!
Makes sense to me.
At 76 years, just retired, I plan on my major health challenge to juggle the creeping failures so that they all crash at once.
Great.
Now we’ll have to start paying for boob jobs for the female mice and Viagra for the male mice.
When will these mice have enough?
Duct tape and WD-40...fixes everything!
Too late for me but just in time to keep Obama in swell shape for eternal annoyance.
Too late for me but just in time to keep Obama in swell shape for eternal annoyance.
I wouldn’t say I embrace it. I’m only 52, but RA is kicking my butt. The chronic pain is doable, but the fatigue is killer. I’m having a hard time adjusting to having to sleep. Lol
Anyone who wants to live forever in a fallen world is crazy. Noah lived 950 years—but God showed mercy and decreased our sentence to 110 years.
No.
People who engage in the most risky behaviors are the ones who would lose the most years of remaining life - teenagers.
Us old codgers who have fewer years to lose are more cautious...
All well and good until you realize the genes are also associated with the growth of tumors.
All well and good until you realize the genes are also associated with the growth of tumors.
It think the key goal should be, as one of the “additional reading” topics alludes to, is: “A healthy old age may trump immortality.”
There is no point in living forever if it is a miserable life.
I chuckle when I see Pappa Bush in his wheelchair and Bill Clinton looking like death warmed over, knowing that these people have had access to medical tech unavailable to the rest of us — and of course rumors of them “selling their souls” and the evil done in association with that choice — just to live forever in this world — all in vain.
Donate blood to reduce iron. Take lactoferrin to chelate iron in the synovial fluid. Take GABA to down regulate the excessive autoimmune response
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