Category Archives: Longevity Medicine

A general interest article on the aging of blood vessels from the Wall Street Journal: "Over time, however, the effects of high blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and tobacco smoke provide a toxic milieu that injures the endothelium. That causes an inflammatory response intended to heal the artery wall, but that in the face of continuous injury only makes things worse. The progressive result is an accumulation of fatty deposits called plaque that can rupture or have their caps shear off, causing clots that lead to heart attacks. In addition, artery walls can stiffen, transforming compliant arteries into conduits like 'Styrofoam tubes' [that] increase both blood pressure and the workload on the heart. ... Both high body mass, particularly belly fat that accounts for a person's bulging waist line, and diabetes have a pernicious effect on the health of adult blood vessels. ... Even if your weight is under control, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, sedentary living and stress all are culprits that can accelerate vascular age."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703406604575278713597433300.html

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The results of this study make for an interesting comparison with research that demonstrates lack of blood vessel dilation in muscles to be a root cause of age-related loss of muscle mass, or sarcopenia: researchers "have determined that moderately and temporarily restricting the flow of blood through muscles - a practice adopted by bodybuilders who noticed that it made light weights feel heavier - can be combined with low-level resistance exercise training to produce muscle-mass increases in older men. ... investigators studied changes in the thigh muscles of seven older men (average age 70) when they performed four minutes of low-resistance leg extension exercises both with and without inflatable cuffs that reduced blood flow out of the muscles. Muscle protein synthesis was measured in each of the men by monitoring changes in a chemical tracer infused into the bloodstream. In addition, a series of biopsies yielded muscle samples that were analyzed to track alterations in biochemical pathways critical to muscle growth. ... We saw that when we put the cuffs on, they responded similarly to young people doing traditional high-intensity resistance exercise."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100514151926.htm

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From Life Extension Magazine: "the name 'regenerative medicine' came from Bill Haseltine, then of Human Genome Sciences, one of the early leaders in genomics and DNA technology. Back in the 1990s, Bill learned that researchers in aging were making important progress on turning back the clock of aging in human cells through cloning, and then creating young cells that could potentially regenerate or repair all the tissues of the aged human body. And so, upon hearing of that realistic prospect, he christened the field 'regenerative medicine' in the belief that it would one day become a major part of medical practice. So, based on its origins, I would define regenerative medicine as that collection of technologies that utilizes embryonic pluripotent stem cells and their derivatives to regenerate tissues in the body ravaged from disease, primarily degenerative disorders associated with aging. ... The problem with human biology is that the immortal reproductive cells that built you and me develop into differentiated cells within our bodies and as a result, lose the capacity to proliferate (divide) forever. So, the cells of the body are mortal, meaning they have a finite life span, and as our tissues age, or deteriorate from disease, our body has a finite capacity to regenerate and repair those tissues. As a result, we suffer progressive declines in function that lead to our death." There is more to aging than this, however.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2010/jun2010_Immortal-Stem-Cells-for-Anti-Aging-Therapies_01.htm

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A lot of work has taken place in recent years on killing cancer cells by heating targeted nanoparticles. Here is an example of the present state of the art: "When irradiated with light, gold nanoparticles become hot quickly, hot enough to generate explosive microbubbles that will kill nearby cancer cells ... To boost this approach, researchers [have] developed a method for creating supramolecular assemblies of gold nanoparticles that function as highly efficient photothermal agents of a size designed to optimize their delivery to tumors. ... They first took gold nanoparticles, 2 nanometers in diameter, and decorated the nanoparticles' surface with adamantane. They then added two other constructs: cyclodextrin attached to a biocompatible polymer known as polyethylenimine, and adamantane linked to polyethylene glycol, another biocompatible polymer. When combined in various ratios, these three constructs quickly assemble into nanoparticles with well defined sizes ranging from 40 to 118 nanometers in diameter. Once the complexes were purified, the researchers then attached a tumor targeting molecule to the surface of the resulting supramolecular complexes. ... when irradiated with a laser beam, the temperature of the assemblies rapidly soared above 374 C, the temperature at which explosive microbubbles form."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.physorg.com/news194078270.html

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Another step forward for tissue engineers: "scientists have created an eight-layer, early stage retina from human embryonic stem cells, the first step toward the development of transplant-ready retinas to treat eye disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration that affect millions. ... The retina is the inside back layer of the eye that records the images a person sees and sends them via the optic nerve from the eye to the brain. Retinal diseases are particularly damaging to sight. More than 10 million Americans suffer from macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in people over 55. About 100,000 have retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive, genetic disorder that usually manifests in childhood. ... To mimic early stage retinal development, the researchers needed to build microscopic gradients for solutions in which to bathe the stem cells to initiate specific differentiation paths. ... creating transplantable retinas from stem cells could help millions of people, and we are well on the way. ... researchers are testing the early-stage retinas in animal models to learn how much they improve vision. Positive results would lead to human clinical trials."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://today.uci.edu/news/2010/05/nr_retina_100526.php

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CNN Money is running a longer piece on calorie restriction mimetic research and the goal of slowing down aging to extend healthy life: "In early 1934, Depression-weary Americans were beginning to see tendrils of hope poking out of the bleak landscape. ... But one of the new year's most promising developments passed almost unnoticed. ... researcher Clive McCay was nearing the end of a four-year study that showed that rats' life spans were greatly extended when they were put on near-starvation diets. To many of his scientific peers, McCay's data made no sense at all. A glorious new chapter in nutrition science had been opened not long before by the discovery of dietary deficiencies behind scourges such as rickets, pellagra, and beriberi. In the wake of such progress, it seemed almost subversive to suggest that a bunch of rodent Oliver Twists, raised on such short rations that their growth was stunted, could live radically longer than well-fed ones. ... Over the next several decades, his discovery was all but forgotten outside of the back halls of science - a laboratory curiosity that didn't actually spark much curiosity. Most scientists were reluctant to risk wasting time probing an anomaly that seemed as baffling as aging itself. Calorie restriction (CR), as it's now called, eventually was shown to extend many species' life spans by a third or more. Now that anti-aging research is hot, it seems bizarre that CR spent decades on science's back shelf."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/24/retirement/retire_rich_anti_aging.fortune/

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