The Body's "Fountain of Youth" Could Lie In the Brain 118
Zothecula writes "Instead of traipsing through Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León might have been better off turning his search inwards. More specifically, he should have turned his attention to a region of the brain called the hypothalamus. At least that's what research carried out on mice by scientists at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University suggests. They found that the hypothalamus controls many aspects of aging, opening up the potential to slow down the aging process by altering signal pathways within that part of the brain."
Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
... it's not quite that simple. There are many mechanisms which impact and cause aging, and while regulation of the hypothalmus may allow the body to more easily compensate for or reduce the impact of some aging symptoms, many other unaffected systems continue to go wrong and grow old. For a better description and more thorough analysis, see:
http://fightaging.org
While this information is interesting from a research standpoint, it's likely to be near-useless in the long term. The only real strategies to properly handle aging are the repair and maintenance approach. Currently, the SENS foundation is one of the biggest funders of research into repair mechanisms, and they could certainly use more support.
http://sens.org
-dentin
would only slow aging, not reverse it (Score:4, Informative)
The legendary Fountain of Youth [wikipedia.org] was supposed to actually reverse aging. This would only slow it down.
Re:Yeesh (Score:4, Informative)
Sure. There are lots of good examples of that. There are also good examples of people making up stories to explain things and, later on, specific details in specific stories happening to coincide with a bit of truth, by coincidence.
There are a LOT of pseudoscientific traditions that all make a lot of (usually very fuzzy) claims. Every once in a while one of them (in this case yoga, or a specific sub-tradition of yoga, more likely) managed to agree (in a very fuzzy way) with the general location and possible function of something noted in a Nature paper, then proceeded to get everything else wrong.