PF4 Released by Platelets a Common Factor in Multiple Interventions Known to Reduce Neuroinflammation
Chronic inflammation of brain tissue is characteristic of aging and neurodegenerative conditions. The worse the inflammation, the worse the outcome. Lasting, unresolved inflammation in the absence of the usual causes of inflammation such as injury or infection occurs in aged tissues for a variety of reasons, including the pro-inflammatory signaling of senescent cells and triggering of innate immune responses by the mislocalization of mitochondrial DNA that occurs as a result of mitochondrial dysfunction. Current methods of suppressing inflammation are crude, a matter of blocking specific inflammatory signals passing betwee...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 24, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Towards the Regrowth of Lost Sensory Hair Cells in the Inner Ear
Age-related deafness arises from some combination of (a) the loss of sensory hair cells in the inner ear, and (b) the loss of connections between those cells and the brain. There is some disagreement in the literature as to which of these mechanisms is the most relevant, but most recent efforts in the field are focused on trying to coerce the body into producing new hair cells. If that production of new hair cells in the inner ear follows the normal developmental processes, then it might solve both of the above mentioned issues, providing both cells and connections to the brain.
Today's research materials illustrate...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 23, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
The Next Pandemic May Be an AI one
By KIM BELLARD
Since the early days of the pandemic, conspiracy theorists have charged that COVID was a manufactured bioweapon, either deliberately leaked or the result of an inadvertent lab leak. There’s been no evidence to support these speculations, but, alas, that is not to say that such bioweapons aren’t truly an existential threat. And artificial intelligence (AI) may make the threat even worse.
Last week the Department of Defense issued its first ever Biodefense Posture Review. It “recognizes that expanding biological threats, enabled by advances in life sciences and biotechnology, are among the ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 23, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy AI Bioterrorism ChatGPT COVID Department of Defense Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
Distinct Signatures for Human Microglia in Alzheimer's Disease
This study identified 10 distinct microglia clusters from aged human brain. These included previously described homeostatic, senescent, and inflammatory microglia transcriptional phenotypes as well as additional clusters of transcriptional specification, which may give insight into AD pathogenesis, providing a platform for hypothesis generation. We describe the diversity of microglia clusters with endolysosomal gene signatures, one of which is enriched with nucleic acid recognition and interferon regulation genes. Inferred gene networks predict that individual clusters are driven by distinct transcription factors, lending ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 22, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
More Evidence Linking Impaired Vision and Dementia Risk
Why would vision impairment correlate with risk of dementia? The retina is an extension of the central nervous system, so one might think that similar processes of aging and neurodegeneration contribute to both loss of visual capacity and loss of cognitive capacity. But it might also be the case that in the brain, as for muscles, there is a degree of "use it or lose it" taking place over the course of later life. Without stimuli, in other words, the aging brain declines more rapidly. Most of the evidence for an association between visual impairment and cognitive impairment in older individuals doesn't allow us to determine...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 21, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 21st 2023
This study aimed to investigate the association between frailty index and circulating CAP2 concentration in 467 community-dwelling older adults (median age: 79; range: 65-92 years). The selected robust regression model showed that circulating CAP2 concentration was not associated with chronological age, as well as sex and education. However, circulating CAP2 concentration was significantly and inversely associated with the frailty index: a 0.1-unit increase in frailty index leads to ~0.5-point mean decrease in CAP2 concentration. Furthermore, mean CAP2 concentration was significantly lower in frail participants (i.e., fr...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 21, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Associations Between the Lipidome and Epigenetic Aging
The body contains hundreds of different types of lipid molecules, participating in cellular metabolism in ways that are just as complex and relevant to health as the activities of other biomolecules. In the context of aging, this broad range of lipids are perhaps understudied in comparison to levels and roles of proteins and patterns of gene expression. The situation is much the same, however: researchers can readily and cost-effectively amass a vast amount of data, but the analysis of this data lags far behind the accumulation of ever more and ever larger omics databases. It is ever unclear as to whether any particular as...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 18, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Progress Towards Therapies for Transthyretin Amyloidosis
Transthyretin is one of the few proteins in the body that can misfold in a way that encourages other copies of the protein to also misfold, forming solid aggregates called amyloid that disrupt tissue structure and function. The resulting condition, transthyretin amyloidosis, clogs up cardiac tissue and thereby contributes to a fraction of all heart failure cases. It is thought to be a major cause of mortality in supercentenarians. Approved therapies targeting a more aggressive form of the condition resulting from a mutated transthyretin gene will not be useful against the much more common version of the condition, as they ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 18, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A Universal Epigenetic Aging Clock for All Mammalian Species
Epigenetic modifications to the nuclear genome, such as the addition of methyl groups to CpG sites, known as DNA methylation, adjust the structure of double-stranded DNA. That structure determines which gene sequences are accessible to transcription machinery, the first step in producing proteins. Thus epigenetics drives gene expression, and gene expression drives the behavior of cells. It is a feedback loop between environment, cell behavior, and epigenetics. The pattern of epigenetic modifications changes constantly in response to circumstances, but some changes are characteristic of aging. When discovered, this led to t...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 17, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Top 6 Companies Using AI In Drug Discovery And Development
What if coming up with a new drug could be measured in days rather than years? What if new medication would cost thousands instead of billions of dollars? Just look at how an AI pharma start-up developed a potential new drug in 46 days! Artificial intelligence technologies promise to speed up the process of drug discovery and development and make it more cost-effective. As the market is flourishing, and it takes time and effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, we collected the most promising AI pharma companies out there.
Drug design is a key area AI is revolutionizing. In one of our latest database projects, we de...
Source: The Medical Futurist - August 17, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: berci.mesko Tags: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Future of Pharma Genomics research clinical trials AI drug development medication drug discovery drug research cure Source Type: blogs
Raised Remnant Cholesterol Level Correlates with Frailty
Remnant cholesterol refers to circulating cholesterol in the bloodstream that is not attached to LDL transport particles coming from the liver or HDL transport particles going to the liver. The remnant is attached to some mix of VLDL and IDL particles that serve much the same purpose as LDL particles, or incorporated into much larger chylomicron transporters that carry dietary lipids from the intestines throughout the body.
Researchers have noted that remnant cholesterol appears to contribute to cardiovascular risk, speeding the progression of atherosclerosis and increasing the risk of stroke and heart attack. It is...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 16, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Glycogen Phosphorylase Inhibition Improves Cognitive Function in Old Mice Only
Today's open access paper provides an interesting example of a pharmacological strategy that is beneficial to specific aspects of memory function in old mice, but detrimental to that same function in young mice. This is certainly possible, as the biochemistry of cells and tissues is nothing if not exceedingly complex, but this outcome tends to be unusual. More commonly, a therapy targeting causative mechanisms of aging, one that improves function in aged individuals, will do little to nothing for younger individuals, but will not be actively harmful.
Here, clearly, the biochemistry of memory formation changes in mea...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 15, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
THCB 20th Birthday Classic: As I’ve always suspected, Health Care = Communism + Frappuccinos
By MATTHEW HOLT
Our 20th birthday continues with a few classics coming out. Back in 2005 I was really cutting a lyrical rug, and would never miss a chance to get that Cambridge training in Marxism into use. This essay about whether health care should be a public or private good has always been one of my favorites, even if I’m not sure Starbucks is still making Frappuccinos. And 18 years later the basic point of this essay remains true, even if many of you will not have a clue who Vioxx or Haliburton were or why they mattered back then!
Those of you who think I’m an unreconstructed commie will correctly suspec...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 15, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt Communism Frappuccinos Source Type: blogs
Survivors of Nuclear Weapon Use in Early Life Exhibit Accelerated Immune Aging in Late Life
It probably strains the meaning of the term to call the aftermath of the use of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War a natural experiment, but nonetheless there has been considerable study of survivors from those events and their health relative to control populations in other parts of Japan. Irradiation is known to produce what is effectively accelerated aging in the context of cancer treatment, producing an increased burden of senescent cells that then ensure the later course of health for survivors is worse than would otherwise be the case, absent both cancer and treatment. In the case of exposure to radia...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 14, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 14th 2023
This study demonstrates just how vital the thymus is to maintaining adult health."
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Does Amyloid-β Aggregation Cause Broad Disruption of Proteostasis?
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/08/does-amyloid-%ce%b2-aggregation-cause-broad-disruption-of-proteostasis/
Researchers here speculate on the ability of insoluble amyloid-β aggregates to be broadly disruptive of the solubility of many other proteins, and thus disruptive to cell and tissue function. Is this important in aging? The evidence here shows the existence of the mechanism in a lower species, but that doesn't ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 13, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
