The Victoria Derbyshire programme’s Benjamin Zand goes on the search for immortality and meets the people who think we could live forever. This film is part of BBC’s ‘Intelligent Machines Week’.
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Our gut and the microbiome play a crucial role in our health, but could better understanding of that role help us avoid disease and live longer?
The microbiome weighs 2–3 pounds and contains 10 times more cells than our own, but we’ve neglected our microbial tenants for a long time. These little denizens help us break down food, provide key nutrients and even play a role in inflammation and the integrity of our intestinal tract. It’s no surprise then that fermented foods and probiotics are gaining popularity as we become more aware of how important our gut is. Recent evidence even links poor digestive health to chronic inflammation and Parkinson’s disease.
New research suggests that both gut integrity, and the amount and type of bacteria that reside within it, can actually predict an individual’s health. They may even quicken or slow the pace of aging.
Dr Michael Fossel is a PhD and MD heading up telomerase research and therapy and has kindly written a blog article for Bioviva detailing the work both they and his company Telocyte are doing to fight back against Alzheimer’s.
How Alzheimer’s Can Be Prevented and Cured…
Michael Fossel, MD, PhD
As I said in my medical textbook on aging, “If age is a thief, then the greatest treasure we lose is ourselves.” We fear Alzheimer’s not simply because it takes away our health, but because it steals our souls.
Kim Suozzi died at age 23 from glioblastoma — a deadly brain tumour.
When she died in 2013, she made sure her fight for survival, albeit an unusual one, would not be forgotten.
She wanted to live forever through a computer and chose to have her brain frozen in the hopes that it may one day be resurrected and transformed into digital code.
Everything starts to go downhill as we get older and muscle is no exception; even simple tasks become challenging as we lose bone and muscle. Now research has identified a protein behind this age-related decline and therapeutic molecules that can fight it, helping individuals stay healthy and strong for longer.
A team at the Univesity of Iowa has discovered that a protein called ATF4 might be behind muscular decline. ATF 4 is a transcription factor, which means it tells the body to activate or regulate certain genes. ATF4 seems to change skeletal muscle with age, reducing protein synthesis and overall mass.
”Many of us know from our own experiences that muscle weakness and atrophy are big problems as we become older”
Continue reading “Aging Causes Muscle Weakness And Atrophy, But Can We Treat It?” »
As we grow older, we lose strength and muscle mass. However, the cause of age-related muscle weakness and atrophy has remained a mystery.
Scientists at the University of Iowa have discovered the first example of a protein that causes muscle weakness and loss during aging. The protein, ATF4, is a transcription factor that alters gene expression in skeletal muscle, causing reduction of muscle protein synthesis, strength, and mass. The UI study also identifies two natural compounds, one found in apples and one found in green tomatoes, which reduce ATF4 activity in aged skeletal muscle. The findings, which were published online Sept. 3 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could lead to new therapies for age-related muscle weakness and atrophy.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QwfH1gYkXTw
The young have always outnumbered the old, but as fertility rates drop and lifespans go up, this is starting to change.
The biology of aging is traditionally studied in fast-living organisms such as mice, worms and fruit flies. Short-lived species certainly have a role to play in this field, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.
Within the natural ecosystem, organisms display a range of aging processes, most often accelerated aging, or gradual aging (in the case of humans), but also, a range of species with slow or even negligible aging, which is known as negligible senescence. Unlike humans, such species have a constant mortality rate for the duration of their lifespan, as well as a constant or even increasing fertility rate. The number of negligibly senescent species which we are currently aware of is likely to grow as more and more are studied and discovered, both in the wild and in the lab.
By studying the processes which give these creatures longer lifespans, there is the possibility that they could be recreated in humans in order to extend our own. How negligible senescence is achieved by each individual species varies, but here are five of the most common traits.
Interesting article in The Telegraph on biohacking and recent Grindfest, where the Immortality Bus stopped:
Immortality aside, DIY “bio-hacking” could provide solutions to everyday problems, despite the risks involved.
