Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 4th 2021
The objective of this study is to quantify the overall and cancer type-specific risks of subsequent primary cancers (SPCs) among adult-onset cancer survivors by first primary cancer (FPC) types and sex. Among 1,537,101 survivors (mean age, 60.4 years; 48.8% women), 156,442 SPC cases and 88,818 SPC deaths occurred during 11,197,890 person-years of follow-up (mean, 7.3 years). Among men, the overall risk of developing any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 18 of the 30 FPC types, and risk of dying from any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 27 of 30 FPC types as compared with risks in the general po...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 3, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
A Look Back at 2020: Progress Towards the Treatment of Aging as a Medical Condition
While I suspect that COVID-19 will feature prominently in most retrospectives on 2020, I'll say only a little on it. The data on mortality by year end, if taken at face value, continues to suggest that the outcome will fall at the higher end of the early estimates of a pandemic three to six times worse than a bad influenza year, ten times worse than a normal influenza year. The people who die are near entirely the old, the co-morbid, and the immunocompromised. They die because they are suffering the damage and dysfunction of aging. Yet the societal conversation and the actions of policy makers ignore this.
There is ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 31, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 21st 2020
In this study, we have found that administration of a specific Sgk1 inhibitor significantly reduces the dysregulated form of tau protein that is a pathological hallmark of AD, restores prefrontal cortical synaptic function, and mitigates memory deficits in an AD model. These results have identified Sgk1 as a potential key target for therapeutic intervention of AD, which may have specific and precise effects."
Targeting histone K4 trimethylation for treatment of cognitive and synaptic deficits in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease
Epigenetic aberration is implicated in aging and neurodegeneration. Using p...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 20, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Microfluidic Device to Test Pancreatic Cancer Drugs
Certain varieties of pancreatic cancer exhibit multiple tumor cell subtypes that work, somewhat mysteriously, to quickly become resistant to chemotherapy agents. Researchers at Purdue University have now built a unique microfluidic device that can be used to test a cancer drug on multiple tumor cells subtypes. Using this technology the researchers believe that new drug therapies can be discovered and existing medicines used more effectively.
“The drug discovery and screening process has been using one cancer cell subtype and studying how it interacts with neighboring non-cancer cells, but this may overestimate the eff...
Source: Medgadget - October 30, 2020 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Materials Medicine Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, October 12th 2020
We report that FMT from aged donors led to impaired spatial learning and memory in young adult recipients, whereas anxiety, explorative behaviour, and locomotor activity remained unaffected.
This was paralleled by altered expression of proteins involved in synaptic plasticity and neurotransmission in the hippocampus. Also, a strong reduction of bacteria associated with short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) production (Lachnospiraceae, Faecalibaculum, and Ruminococcaceae) and disorders of the CNS (Prevotellaceae and Ruminococcaceae) was observed. Finally, the detrimental effect of FMT from aged donors on the CNS was confir...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 11, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Delivery of T Cell Progenitor Cells as an Approach to Thymic Regeneration
The thymus is a small organ in which thymocytes generated in the bone marrow mature to become T cells of the adaptive immune system. Unfortunately, the thymus atrophies with age, its active tissue largely replaced by fat in most people by age 50 or so. Thereafter the adaptive immune system declines into immunosenescence and inflammaging, deprived of a sufficiently large supply of reinforcement cells. Given the importance of the immune system to health, in matters including tissue maintenance, resistance to infection, suppression of cancer, and more, regeneration of the thymus must be an important component of any serious e...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 7, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 28th 2020
In conclusion, it remains unclear if brain-specific regional and temporal changes occur in the expression of the different APP variants during AD progression. Since APP is also found in blood cells, assessing the changes in APP mRNA expression in peripheral blood cells from AD patients has been considering an alternative. However, again the quantification of APP mRNA in peripheral blood cells has generated controversial results.
Brain APP protein has been analyzed in only a few studies, probably as it is difficult to interpret the complex pattern of APP variants and fragments. We previously characterized the soluabl...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 27, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 14th 2020
This study is the first to provide a direct link between this inflammation and plaque development - by way of IFITM3.
Scientists know that the production of IFITM3 starts in response to activation of the immune system by invading viruses and bacteria. These observations, combined with the new findings that IFITM3 directly contributes to plaque formation, suggest that viral and bacterial infections could increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease development. Indeed, researchers found that the level of IFITM3 in human brain samples correlated with levels of certain viral infections as well as with gamma-secretase activ...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 13, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 7th 2020
In conclusion, using a large cohort with rich health and DNA methylation data, we provide the first comparison of six major epigenetic measures of biological ageing with respect to their associations with leading causes of mortality and disease burden. DNAm GrimAge outperformed the other measures in its associations with disease data and associated clinical traits. This may suggest that predicting mortality, rather than age or homeostatic characteristics, may be more informative for common disease prediction. Thus, proteomic-based methods (as utilised by DNAm GrimAge) using large, physiologically diverse protein sets for p...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 6, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
A Bidirectional Relationship Between the Gut Microbiome and Aging
The gut microbiome is influential on health over the long term, possible as much so as exercise. That said, research related to aging in this part of the field is comparatively recent, and consequently is far less developed than the long-standing evidence for the effects of exercise on mortality and risk of age-related disease. It seems fairly clear that the gut microbiome changes in characteristic ways with age, becoming less helpful and more harmful. Species that produce beneficial metabolites decline in number and activity, while inflammatory microbial populations grow in size, contributing the state of chronic inflamma...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 2, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 24th 2020
We report that electrical stimulation (ES) stimulation of post-stroke aged rats led to an improved functional recovery of spatial long-term memory (T-maze), but not on the rotating pole or the inclined plane, both tests requiring complex sensorimotor skills. Surprisingly, ES had a detrimental effect on the asymmetric sensorimotor deficit.
Histologically, there was a robust increase in the number of doublecortin-positive cells in the dentate gyrus and SVZ of the infarcted hemisphere and the presence of a considerable number of neurons expressing tubulin beta III in the infarcted area. Among the genes that were unique...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 23, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 10th 2020
This study aimed to characterize the role of BDNF in age-related microglial activation. Initially, we found that degrees of microglial activation were especially evident in the substantia nigra (SN) across different brain regions of aged mice. The levels of BDNF and TrkB in microglia decreased with age and negatively correlated with their activation statuses in mice during aging. Interestingly, aging-related microglial activation could be reversed by chronic, subcutaneous perfusion of BDNF. Peripheral lipopolysaccharide (LPS) injection-induced microglial activation could be reduced by local supplement of BDNF, while shTrkB...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 9, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
How Calorie Restriction Improves Intestinal Stem Cell Function
The practice of calorie restriction, eating up to 40% fewer calories while still maintaining an optimal intake of micronutrients, is well demonstrated to slow aging and extend healthy life span in near all species and lineages tested to date. It produces sweeping effects on the operation of metabolism - near everything changes, which has made it something of a challenge to identify the principal points of action. Nonetheless, more efficient operation of the cellular housekeeping mechanisms of autophagy is the most plausible mechanism to account for the majority of the benefits. That calorie restriction fails to extend life...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 3, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 3rd 2020
In this study, we examined the effects of oxytocin on the Aβ-induced impairment of synaptic plasticity in mice.
To investigate the effect of oxytocin on synaptic plasticity, we prepared acute hippocampal slices for extracellular recording and assessed long-term potentiation (LTP) with perfusion of the Aβ active fragment (Aβ25-35) in the absence and presence of oxytocin. We found that oxytocin reversed the impairment of LTP induced by Aβ25-35 perfusion in the mouse hippocampus. These effects were blocked by pretreatment with the selective oxytocin receptor antagonist L-368,899. Furthermore, the treatment with the...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 2, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, July 13th 2020
In conclusion, sitting for prolonged periods of time without interruption is unfavorably associated with DBP and HDL cholesterol.
Exercise Slows Inappropriate Growth of Blood Vessels in a Mouse Model of Macular Degeneration
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/07/exercise-slows-inappropriate-growth-of-blood-vessels-in-a-mouse-model-of-macular-degeneration/
Excessive growth of blood vessels beneath the retina is a proximate cause of blindness in conditions such as macular degeneration. Researchers here provide evidence for physical activity to be influential in the pace at which this process of tissu...
Source: Fight Aging! - July 12, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
