The Rodent Aging Interventions Database
You might compare the LEV Foundation's Rodent Aging Interventions Database with the DrugAge database, both emerging from the efforts of researchers who found themselves frequently reviewing the existing literature on age-slowing interventions in animal models. One of the things to bear in mind about the existing literature is that rodent studies that show an apparent modest slowing of aging frequently fail to replicate when later investors take a more rigorous approach, with larger numbers of mice. The history of the NIA Interventions Testing Program is largely a repeated demonstration of this point. The Rodent Ag...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 25, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Genetics by the Numbers
Even though scientists have been studying genetics since the mid-19th century, they continue to make new discoveries about genes and how they impact our health on a regular basis. NIGMS researchers study how genes are expressed and regulated, how gene variants with different “spellings” of their genetic code affect health, and much more. Get the drop on DNA and the gist of genes with these fast facts: 3.2 Billion A marbled lungfish has a genome over 40 times larger than humans. Credit: iStock. That’s how many base pairs—or sets of genetic “letters”—make up the human genome. If you were...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - April 24, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Genes By the Numbers DNA Genomics Source Type: blogs

Biotechnology and biological warfare [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! We welcome Ketan Desai, a physician executive, as we’ll delve into the fascinating and concerning realm of biological warfare and bioterrorism. Join us as we explore historical instances of biological weapons, the implications of genetic technology advancements, and the ethical considerations Read more… Biotechnology and biological warfare [PODCAST] originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - April 23, 2024 Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Podcast Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Source Type: blogs

The Role of Immune Aging in Neurodegenerative Conditions
The research community has come to see chronic inflammation and other age-related immune system dysfunctions as an important aspect of neurodegenerative conditions. Inflammation in the short term is necessary for defense against pathogens and regeneration following injury. Unresolved, constant inflammation is harmful to tissue structure and function, however, changing cell behavior for the worse. In brain tissue, the effects of inflammatory signaling on the behavior of innate immune cells called microglia appears particularly important. Neurogenerative conditions are characterized by activated microglia. These microglia ar...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 23, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Ozempic And Other Weight Loss Drugs Will Only Work With Digital Health
Weight loss injections are now widely used as miracle drugs for effortless skinniness. But without digital health, they just won’t work in the long run. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, approved Wegovy, a semaglutide injection for chronic weight management in adults with obesity or overweight with at least one weight-related condition for use in addition to a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity in 2021.  Semaglutide was originally used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and was found to have a major lucky side effect: being very effective in assisting weight loss. Semaglutide inject...
Source: The Medical Futurist - April 23, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Andrea Koncz Tags: Digital Health Research weight management weight loss Ozempic Wagevy Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 22nd 2024
This study reveals a potential treatment for human mitochondrial diseases. « Back to Top A Population Study Correlates Air Pollution with Faster Cognitive Aging https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2024/04/a-population-study-correlates-air-pollution-with-faster-cognitive-aging/ A number of large epidemiological studies provide evidence for long-term exposure to greater levels of air pollution to accelerate the onset and progression of age-related disease. A few of these manage to control for the tendency for wealthier people to avoid living in areas with higher particulate air pollution, ...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 21, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Parkinson's Disease in the SENS View of Damage Repair
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is a view of aging as accumulated damage. Drawing from the extensive scientific literature on aging, the originators of SENS created an outline of the forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental causes of aging, in that they occur as a natural side-effect of the normal operation of our cellular biochemistry. So we might consider the loss of vital cells due to declining stem cell function, mutations to nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, cross-linking of vital molecules in the extracellular matrix, accumulated metabolic waste in long-lived cells, generation ...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 19, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

MKP1 as a Target for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
The causes of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis remain somewhat unclear, which is often the case for conditions in which treatments struggle to achieve more than a slowed progression. There is evidence for cellular senescence to drive the progression of fibrosis, but most research remains focused on the molecular biochemistry of fibroblasts, the cells responsible for building the collagen deposits characteristic of fibrotic tissue. The process by which lung injury either leads to healing or fibrosis relies in part on what happens to a cell called a fibroblast, which forms connective tissue. During injury or illness, f...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 19, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Herpes Simplex Infection Correlates with Amyloid Burden in the Aging Brain
There is a continuing debate over the degree to which Alzheimer's is driven by persistent infection in brain tissue, such as by varieties of herpesvirus. Amyloid-β is an antimicrobial peptide, a part of the innate immune response, and one could argue that persistently raised expression of amyloid-β will increase misfolding and generation of the aggregates that drive pathology in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, at least under the amyloid cascade hypothesis. The data is not all convincing, however, which suggests that perhaps there are other factors involved - that multiple viruses interact in some people, for exa...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 15, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Bonus Features – April 14, 2024 – Less than 6 in 10 docs satisfied with electronic access to external immunization info, 68% of nurses are feeling overwhelmed, plus 38 more stories
This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job. News The biggest story of the week was that Epic turned off access to certain medical record requests from Particle Health users on the Carequality exchange. “We believe strongly that this unilateral action is a violation ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - April 14, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Brian Eastwood Tags: Healthcare IT Anatomy IT Apixio Apple Vision Pro Ashley McEvoy athenahealth Atlantic Health System AvaSure Bayer Cedar Chris Ricaurte CLEW Medical Clinical Trial Media CloudWave Collette Health DeepScribe DrFirst eClinica Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 15th 2024
In conclusion, although several clinical trials targeting SnCs are ongoing, various questions about the biology of SnCs remain open, resulting in a gap between molecular and cellular data. Concerning the need, initiatives such as SenNet aiming to create openly accessible atlases of SnCs should contribute enormously to the area. Advances in understanding the subcellular structure, the heterogeneity, and the dynamics of SnCs require the integration of molecular and cellular techniques with data analysis packages to evaluate high throughput evidence from microscopy and flow cytometry. It is also necessary to develop new equip...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 14, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Long-Lived RNA that is Never Replaced in Neurons
The question of whether there are long-lived molecules in long-lived neurons in the brain is an interesting one. Are there specific molecules in the brain that never get replaced across a lifetime, and thus might be vulnerable to damage in the form of modifications that disrupt function? This remains a somewhat hypothetical concern, in the sense that there is no direct demonstration that this is a significant source of dysfunction in late life. Researchers have found evidence for long-lived nuclear pore proteins, however, and here another group presents evidence for long-lived RNA molecules. Most cells in the huma...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 12, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

An Update on Reversal of Atherosclerosis at Repair Biotechnologies
As some of you know, Repair Biotechnologies is the company I co-founded with Bill Cherman back in 2018. We've been working on an approach to reverse atherosclerosis for much of that time, and matters have progressed through the stage of great data in mice to present preparations for a pre-IND meeting with the FDA. While excess cholesterol has long been understood to be important to the development of atherosclerosis, it turns out that circulating cholesterol bound to LDL particles is less important than the amount of localized excess cholesterol in the liver and blood vessel walls. Any localized excess of cholestero...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 11, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs

Thoughts on RNU4-2 Mutation Paper
A new preprint based on Genomics UK data has identified a set of single base insertion mutations (predominantly a specific A insertion)   in a spliceosomal RNA which is responsible for about 0.5% of previously undiagnosed genetic cases of syndromic neurodevelopmental disorders . That's a remarkably high frequency mutation which has gone unnoticed to date, but the fact it was hiding in a non-protein-coding RNA (a spliceosome component called RNU4-2) had much to do with that - this gene won't be in any exome panels. The mutation always appears to be de novo and therefore the pathogenic phenotype is dominant.    I&...
Source: Omics! Omics! - April 10, 2024 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

What Is Genetics?
This post is the first in our miniseries on genetics. Stay tuned for more! Genetics is the study of genes and heredity—how traits are passed from parents to children through DNA. A gene is a segment of DNA that contains instructions for building one or more molecules that help the body work. Researchers estimate that humans have about 20,000 genes, which account for about 1 percent of our DNA. The remainder of the DNA plays a role in regulating genes, and scientists are researching other potential functions. DNA Details Credit: NIGMS. DNA is shaped like a twisted ladder, called a double heli...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - April 8, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Genes Common questions DNA Genetics Miniseries Genomics Source Type: blogs