A Summary of the NIA Interventions Testing Program

The NIA Interventions Testing Program (ITP) is a fairly old-school effort to rigorously test all the plausible claims of modestly slowed aging in mice via pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, and environmental factors like calorie restriction. For those of us more interested in outright rejuvenation through damage repair after the SENS model, rather than merely slowing aging a little, I think there still a number of things worth learning from the ITP results to date. For example, firstly, that almost all claims of slowed aging in mice due to supplements and drugs made in past years were artifacts or otherwise erroneous results, and vanish when evaluated with greater rigor. That suggests that any result of around 10% life extension in mice should probably be taken with a grain of salt, given that the ITP researchers have observed variance in the life spans of control mice raised in identical environments at different study sites. Secondly, that it is very hard to evaluate small differences in aging and life span. This is a part of the larger point I try to make on efforts to slow aging: that for a number of reasons it is more expensive and more challenging than attempts to produce rejuvenation by reverting the established differences between old and young tissues, such as accumulations of metabolic waste, senescent cells, and other forms of molecular damage. Rejuvenation therapies, when they work, should reliably result in larger differences in life span - there should be abs...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs