The Gut Microbiome and Alzheimer's Disease
The balance of microbial populations making up the gut microbiome changes with age, both a loss of microbes generating beneficial metabolites and an increase in the number of inflammatory microbes. Separately from this harmful process, a number of studies have shown that that aged gut microbiome is distinctly different in patients with Alzheimer's disease, suggesting that there may be a meaningful contribution to disease onset and progression arising from the gut. The precise mechanisms involved have yet to be identified. While inflammation has an important role in Alzheimer's disease, the contribution of an Alzheimer's-li...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 27, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Repeated Cycles of a Fasting-Mimicking Diet Reduce Measures of Biological Age
We report on the secondary outcome measures of the FMD-trial (NCT02158897) which are biomarkers associated with aging or age-related diseases, and metabolic syndrome, including visceral and hepatic fat, lymphoid/myeloid ratios, and blood markers, which were not investigated in the original report.
We show that 3 FMD cycles in adult study participants are associated with reduced insulin resistance and other pre-diabetes markers, lower hepatic fat (as determined by magnetic resonance imaging), and increased lymphoid to myeloid ratio, an indicator of immune system age. Based on the Klemera-Doubal measure of biological a...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 27, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Telomere Length as a Target for Therapy
Average telomere length in a tissue is some reflection of (a) stem cell activity and (b) pace of cell division. Telomeres, repeated DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes, lose some of their length with each cell division, and cells self-destruct or become senescent when telomeres become too short. This limits the ability of somatic cells to replicate, reducing the odds that a given cell will mutate to become cancerous by imposing a limit on cell activity and cell life span, enforcing turnover of cells in tissues. Stem cells, in comparison, are a small, well protected, privileged set of cell populations that use telomera...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 26, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Increased Dietary Leucine Activates mTOR Signaling in Macrophages, Accelerating Atherosclerosis
Leucine is an essential amino acid, only obtained from the diet rather than synthesized by our cells. Leucine supplementation has been proposed as a way to slow the loss of muscle mass with age, as leucine processing becomes dysregulated with aging in a way that can be compensated for by adding more leucine to the diet. Whether this actually works is a matter for debate; the evidence is mixed. The question is never whether the mechanism exists, the question is whether it has a large enough effect size to matter.
Given this impetus for a greater intake of dietary leucine in later life, it is interesting to see the re...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 26, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Herpes Simplex Infection Doubles the Later Risk of Dementia
In conclusion, HSV (but not CMV) infection may be indicative of doubled dementia risk.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-230718 (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - February 26, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, February 26th 2024
In conclusion, mTORC1 signaling contributes to the ISC fate decision, enabling regional control of intestinal cell differentiation in response to nutrition.
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Reviewing the Development of Senotherapeutics to Treat Aging
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2024/02/reviewing-the-development-of-senotherapeutics-to-treat-aging/
Senescent cells accumulate with age and contribute meaningfully to chronic inflammation and degenerative aging. Destroying these cells produces rapid and sizable reversal of age-related diseases in mice, demonstrating that the presence of senescence cells ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 25, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
An Update on Kimer Med, Improving on the DRACO Antiviral Technology and Moving Towards the Clinic
The state of anti-viral therapies isn't that great, all things considered. Technology has not yet advanced to the point at which a viral infection can be simply shut down, as is the case for near all bacterial infections. The present anti-viral drugs are either vaccines (useful!) or merely shift the odds somewhat by interfering in some part of the viral life cycle, but nowhere near as effectively as desired. Many persistent viral infections are thought to contribute meaningfully to forms of age-related dysfunction, and there is too little that can be done about that at the present time.
This landscape is one of the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 23, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs
Correlations with Mortality in Levels of Proteins Secreted by Senescent Cells
Here, researchers investigate correlations between late life mortality and levels of specific proteins produced by senescent cells as a part of the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). While looking over the paper, it is worth bearing in mind that circulating levels of many of the molecules thought to be important components of the SASP do not appear to correlate well with senescent cell burden. Why this is the case remains to be understood on a molecule by molecule basis, but note that many of the SASP molecules are widely used for signaling by other cell types and in other circumstances.
A robust an...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 23, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
RNA Transfer Between Cells is Tightly Regulated, and Disruption Shortens Life Span
It is not always the case that genetic alterations that shorten life span are interesting: there are many ways to break a complex system, and only some of those breakages are relevant to the dysfunction of aging. Researchers here explore the transfer of RNA between cells in nematode worms, showing that too much RNA uptake causes reduced life span. Is this relevant to aging, however? Most likely only if this set of regulatory processes become changed in maladaptive ways in later life. Otherwise, this is just another one of the countless different ways to break the complex regulatory systems of a living organism.
In...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 23, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Attempting to Determine Harmful versus Adaptive Changes Using Epigenetic Clock Techniques
The largest of the present challenges facing the use of epigenetic clocks to measure biological age is that there is no established causal connection between what the clock measures, meaning the methylation status of specific CpG sites on the genome, and specific aspects of the burden of age-related damage and dysfunction; e.g. which changes are due to chronic inflammation, which due to mitochondrial dysfunction, etc. Thus the results obtained from an epigenetic clock assay, the raw methylation data or the resulting epigenetic age, are not actionable. There is nothing one can do with that information to guide health practi...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 22, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
MTTP as a Mediator of the Benefits of Exercise
MTTP is a longevity-associated gene involved in lipid metabolism and correlated with cardiovascular function. Here, researchers use flies to demonstrate that the fly version of MTTP, called mtp, is involved in the mechanisms by which exercise improves long-term cardiac health. It isn't clear as to how exactly MTTP or mtp is involved in the known set of mechanisms important to the pace of aging and cardiovascular health. That sort of deep dive into establishing connections between cellular processes occurs only after numerous studies have demonstrated an interesting correlation, and even then it is a slow and incremental pr...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 22, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Signaling Between Cell Types is Vital to Heart Regeneration
A fair amount of the research and development work aimed at spurring greater regeneration of an injured heart is focused on cardiomyocytes, either by delivering new cells, or by encouraging existing cells to replicate or otherwise better resist the hostile environment following injury. As researchers here point out, regeneration is known to be an intricate dance between multiple different cell populations. Thus the signaling that facilitates coordination between those cell types may prove to be a better target for intervention than any single cell population, and single cell population approaches that have shown promise in...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 22, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A Popular Science View of Recent Thinking on DNA Damage as a Cause of Aging
There are presently two views of the way in which stochastic DNA damage can contribute to aging. Most DNA damage occurs in inactive genes in cells that will not replicate many more times, and thus cannot possibly produce systemic consequences throughout large regions of the body. The first argument for a way in which random DNA damage can produce a broader effect is via somatic mosaicism, in which mutational damage occurs in stem cells, allowing those mutations to spread throughout tissue over time. It is unclear as to how to measure the contribution of this process to age-related loss of function, however, and its contrib...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 21, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Circulating Claudin-5 Correlates with Age and Alzheimer's Disease
In this study, we developed a blood-based assay for CLDN-5 and investigated its diagnostic utility using 100 cognitively normal (control) subjects, 100 patients with MCI, and 100 patients with AD. Plasma CLDN-5 levels were increased in patients with AD (3.08 ng/mL) compared with controls (2.77 ng/mL).
The BBB functions as a selective gate for the uptake of essential molecules from blood into the brain and the excretion of harmful molecules from the brain into blood via transporters and receptors on cellular membranes. In addition, the BBB prevents the influx of blood-borne neurotoxins, cells, and pathogens into the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 21, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A Gene Therapy to Promote Cardiomyocyte Proliferation Improves Late Stage Heart Failure in Rats
In this study, we did something that had not been done before. We intervened with the same gene therapy but not during acute heart failure or early in the disease as in our previous experiments, but late in the disease during the chronic phase four weeks after cardiac injury had severely damaged the heart."
Four months after treating the animals, the researchers checked cardiac function and heart structure. "We were surprised to see evidence of significant heart cell proliferation, a marked reduction in scar size and a significant improvement in cardiac function. Although heart dilation and lung congestion associate...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 21, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
