Notes on Self-Experimentation with Sex Steroid Ablation for Regrowth of the Thymus

I periodically publish thoughts on self-experiments that seem interesting and relevant to aging. Despite the influence of the quantified self movement, the broader self-experimentation community is largely terrible on matters of research, rigor, reporting, and safety. My motivation is to something to raise the bar on all of these items. For every discussion I've published on a particular self-experiment, there are half a dozen others sitting at some stage of research and interest. Over the past year or so, I've been on and off looking into sex steroid ablation as a mechanism for thymus regrowth. Since my company, Repair Biotechnologies, works on thymus regrowth as a way to reverse immune system aging, I have read up on most of the ways in which that has been attempted or achieved in animals and humans. The thymus is responsible for the maturation of T cells, a complicated process in which the cells are educated to attack pathogens and dangerous cells, but not normal tissue. The thymus atrophies with age, and by age 50 there is usually little active tissue left. Lacking a robust supply of new T cells, the immune system slowly declines into immunosenescence. In humans, only two approaches to thymus regeneration have produced positive results. The small Intervene Immune trial used lengthy treatment with growth hormone alongside a few other substances to try to offset the negative effects of growth hormone. More impressive results, at least in the metrics measured, ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Self-Experimentation Source Type: blogs