A High Level Survey of Mechanisms of Brain Aging

Ultimately, we live and die as the brain lives and dies. The rest of the body is a support system, a complex one to be sure, but probably not as complex as the brain. Repairing the cell and tissue damage of aging in the body seems a more tractable challenge, in that replacement is always an option. Replace cells, replace the gut microbiome, add new tissues grown in a lab to organs like the liver and thymus, or grow a new body and transplant the brain. A path of ever increasing control over cells, cell signaling, and regeneration implies a future in which all damaged tissue can be replaced in one way or another ... except for the brain, because the fine structure of brain tissue encodes the data of the mind. Here, a different solution is needed. Today, of course, researchers understand all too little of the details. Medical biotechnologies are simple, barely at the stage of manipulating one gene or protein interaction at a time, unable to deliver therapeutics to only and exactly the cells that we want to affect, a search for points of intervention in which a change cascades in ways that are more rather than less favorable, discarding the many points of intervention that the present state of the art cannot influence. This will change, the future is golden, but it is worth looking at continued efforts to understand the fine details of aging in the brain with this in mind. The goal at the end of the day is a way to repair all of the biochemistry of the brain in situ, witho...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs