Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 6th 2024
In conclusion, we found that elevated central aortic stiffness is associated with a greater decline in kidney function in old age. Since aPWV and cSBP both appear to be predictors of eGFR decline, it might be of interest to identify older individuals with elevated aortic stiffness. In this specific population, intensive blood pressure reduction might be justified in order to slow down the process of vascular aging and prevent kidney function decline. « Back to Top Cellular Senescence in Neurodegenerative Conditions https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2024/04/cellular-senescence-in-neurodegenera...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 5, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Juventology as an Complementary Alternative to Gerontology
There are many different ways to conceptualize programs of research and development aimed at the treatment of aging. The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is focused on aging as damage accumulation, and treatment is thus damage repair: remove senescent cells, restore mitochondrial function, clear out harmful protein aggregates, and so forth. Programmed aging viewpoints instead focus on ways to alter what are suspected to be evolved programs that drive aging, with this line of thought most often centered around the reversal of epigenetic changes that are observed to occur with age. In today's ope...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 3, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Progress Towards Cardiomyocyte Cell Therapy for the Injured Heart
Researchers here demonstrate an approach to cell therapy for an injured heart that produces lesser degrees of abnormal function than prior efforts. There has been some concern that delivering new cells to the heart to spur greater regeneration will disrupt the electrical regulation of heartbeats, as animal studies suggested an unacceptable risk of arrhythmia following treatment. This work still makes use of cardiomyocytes generated from induced pluripotent stem cells, already accomplished by a number of other groups, but differences in the details of the approach appear to make a positive change in the outcome. In...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 3, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Stair Climbing as an Example of Physical Activity Correlated with Reduced Mortality Risk
This study investigated whether climbing stairs, as a form of physical activity, could play a role in reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease and premature death. The authors collected the best available evidence on the topic and conducted a meta-analysis. Studies were included regardless of the number of flights of stairs and the speed of climbing. There were nine studies with 480,479 participants in the final analysis. The study population included both healthy participants and those with a previous history of heart attack or peripheral arterial disease. Ages ranged from 35 to 84 years old and 53% of particip...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 3, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Atherosclerosis
Atherosclerosis is the growth of fatty lesions in blood vessel walls, ultimately leading to a heart attack or stroke when an unstable lesion ruptures. Atherosclerosis is primarily a condition of macrophage dysfunction, in which these cells fail to keep up with their task of removing excess cholesterol from blood vessel walls in order to return it to to the bloodstream for transport back to the liver. The local excess of cholesterol is largely the proximate cause of this macrophage dysfunction, so as the amount of cholesterol grows, macrophages become ever less capable of dealing with it. They die, adding their mass to the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 2, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

A Programmed Aging View of Epigenetic Clock Challenges
The author of this paper is an advocate for programmed aging. This is the view that degenerative aging is actively selected by evolutionary processes, perhaps because it helps to reduce the risk of runaway population growth, or perhaps because aging species better adapt to ecological change, rather than being a side-effect of selection effects focused on early life reproductive success that tend to produce systems that accumulate damage to fail over time. In some programmed aging views, epigenetic change is close to being the root cause of aging, being the implementation of an evolutionarily selected program. It is interes...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 2, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Characterizing Age-Related Changes in Sweat Gland Biochemistry
The progressive dysfunction of sweat glands in the skin is probably not high on the list of items that people think about in the context of degenerative aging, at least not until they experience it. A reduced capacity of sweat glands leads to heat intolerance, and it is one of the contributing causes of the raised mortality rate among the elderly in heat waves. Here, researchers examine some of the biochemistry of sweat gland cells in aging mice. They focus in on a number of proteins that may turn out to be viable targets for drugs to force sweat glands in aged skin back to a more youthful degree of function. It is a long ...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 2, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

The Future of Vaccination in the Old Must Involve Reversal of Immunosenescence
Robust modern forms of vaccination that were developed in the 20th century remain one of the most important forms of medical technology. Infectious diseases are not going away any time soon, and continue to cause a sizable fraction of human mortality, even though that fraction is much reduced in our era. Unfortunately, effective vaccination depends on an effective immune system, and thus vaccines tend to perform increasingly poorly with advancing age. As we age our immune system becomes ever less capable, a decline into immunosenescence caused by a range of contributing processes: involution of the thymus, where T cells of...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Excess Intracellular Cholesterol Provokes Macrophage Senescence
One the important themes of the research and development at Repair Biotechnologies is that localized excesses of cholesterol arise with age, leading to excess intracellular cholesterol, which is a pathological mechanism that disrupts cell behavior and kills cells. Getting rid of these localized excesses of cholesterol is challenging, however, unless resorting to some form of engineered protein machinery or gene therapy. Cells cannot break down cholesterol and there is no good way to bind enough of the excess cholesterol to some form of small molecule for sequestration and disposal without also targeting vital cholesterol i...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Improved Autophagy Slows Age-Related Muscle Loss in Mice
Improved autophagy is implicated in many of the approaches shown to slow aging in animal models. An open question is whether more targeted approaches to altering the regulation of autophagy in aged cells can improve matters to a greater degree than, for example, exercise or the practice of calorie restriction, both of which are known to produce general improvements in autophagy. Researchers here show that improvement of autophagy via increased expression of TRP53INP2 in old mice can reduce the age-related loss muscle mass and function that leads to sarcopenia. It seems an interesting target for further development of thera...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

The TAME Trial for Metformin Remains Only Partially Funded
The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) clinical trial has been a feature of the divide between regulators, researchers, and industry in the matter of treating aging as a medical condition for as about as long as the longevity industry has existed. Regulators such as the FDA do not consider aging to be a disease, and they only approve treatments for specific diseases, largely using the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases as the basis for what is and is not a disease. The TAME trial came into being as a way to convince the FDA to approve a treatment on the basis of endpoints that approxima...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 30, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs

Cellular Senescence in Neurodegenerative Conditions
This open access review paper covers the high points of what is presently known of the contribution of senescent cells to neurodegenerative conditions. Somatic cells become senescent throughout life, largely as they reach the Hayflick limit to replication, but also due to damage or a toxic local environment. Senescent cells halt replication and begin to secrete pro-inflammatory signals to attract the immune system. In youth, senescent cells are rapidly cleared by programmed cell death or by immune cells. With age, the immune system becomes less efficient. As a consequence senescent cells begin to accumulate, and they help ...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 30, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Raised Blood Pressure and Arterial Stiffness Correlate with Loss of Kidney Function
In conclusion, we found that elevated central aortic stiffness is associated with a greater decline in kidney function in old age. Since aPWV and cSBP both appear to be predictors of eGFR decline, it might be of interest to identify older individuals with elevated aortic stiffness. In this specific population, intensive blood pressure reduction might be justified in order to slow down the process of vascular aging and prevent kidney function decline. Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm13051334 (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - April 30, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Presence of Cardiometabolic Disease Correlates with Accelerated Brain Aging
It is well known that metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease correlate well with an accelerated onset and progression of neurodegenerative conditions. This is particularly evident when considering these conditions in the context of obesity. Age-related diseases are the late stage consequences of a progressive accumulation of cell and tissue damage, and so a lifestyle that accelerates those underlying damage processes will produce a greater incidence of all of the common age-related diseases. Suffering from one form of age-related disease thus implies greater odds of suffering other forms of age-related disease, a...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 29, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

A Progressive Failure of Glucose Regulation in the Aging Brain
There has long been a school of thought on Alzheimer's disease that consideres it a form of diabetes, in which dysregulated glucose metabolism features prominently. This dysregulation certainly occurs; the study noted here isn't the only one to show that the aging brain no longer manages glucose adequately. The question is whether this mechanism is important relative to all of the other processes thought to contribute to the pathology of Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions, and where it fits in a chain of cause and consequence. Finding ways to demonstrate the relative importance of different mechanis...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 29, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs