New Cause of Cell Aging Discovered: Senescent Cells Stop Producing Nucleotides (sciencedaily.com) 103
New research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering could be key to our understanding of how the aging process works. The findings potentially pave the way for better cancer treatments and revolutionary new drugs that could vastly improve human health in the twilight years. ScienceDaily reports: "To drink from the fountain of youth, you have to figure out where the fountain of youth is, and understand what the fountain of youth is doing," said Nick Graham, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. "We're doing the opposite; we're trying to study the reasons cells age, so that we might be able to design treatments for better aging." To achieve this, lead author Alireza Delfarah, a graduate student in the Graham lab, focused on senescence, a natural process in which cells permanently stop creating new cells. This process is one of the key causes of age-related decline, manifesting in diseases such as arthritis, osteoporosis and heart disease.
The research team discovered that the aging, senescent cells stopped producing a class of chemicals called nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. When they took young cells and forced them to stop producing nucleotides, they became senescent, or aged. "This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young," Delfarah said. "It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly." Graham said that the team's research has applications in the emerging field of senolytics, the development of drugs that may be able to eliminate aging cells. He said that human clinical trials are still in early stages, but studies with mice have shown that by eliminating senescent cells, mice age better, with a more productive life span. The study has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The research team discovered that the aging, senescent cells stopped producing a class of chemicals called nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. When they took young cells and forced them to stop producing nucleotides, they became senescent, or aged. "This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young," Delfarah said. "It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly." Graham said that the team's research has applications in the emerging field of senolytics, the development of drugs that may be able to eliminate aging cells. He said that human clinical trials are still in early stages, but studies with mice have shown that by eliminating senescent cells, mice age better, with a more productive life span. The study has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Fasting (Score:5, Informative)
Try regularly fasting for a few days, where you only take zero-calorie drinks, and maybe some salts. When you fast, you body quickly runs out of amino acids to build new proteins. Because protein synthesis is absolutely vital to stay alive, your body will start to break down proteins to recycle amino acids. A lot of people seem to think that the body is stupid enough to start breaking down healthy muscle tissue first, but in reality, the body prioritizes breaking down anything that is old and worn, which will help get rid of senescent cells. There are all kinds of mechanisms for detecting poorly functioning cells, but during times of excess food, these mechanisms are set to 'easy mode', where the cells are left alone and can cause problems. Our ancestors had regular fasts, simply because they ran out of food, so the "cellulary clean up" (autophagy) happened on a regular basis. In modern times, people eat every couple of hours, and they never trigger this clean up.
At the same time, during a fast, your body creates growth hormones, and activates stem cells. When you start eating again, these will help to replace the broken down cells with new ones.
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Yes, the salts (i.e. electrolytes) are hugely important. I fasted for several days but the day I came off the fast, I had seizures which sent me to the ER. Luckily they were able to put me on an IV drip to restore the missing electrolytes. Low electrolytes can kill you. No doubt about it.
Re: Fasting (Score:1)
Yeah, that's why you need to get a shitload of salt when you're fasting. I have it in coffee, on bread and via supplements, as when you drink a lot, and sweat a lot you use it & lose it. You really don't want to run out of salt.
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The burden of proof [wikipedia.org] is on the claimant.
"That which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."
Re:Fasting (Score:5, Informative)
Our ancestors
It is worth keeping in mind that our ancestors mostly avoided old age problems by dying young. All this worship of primitive lifestyle seems to omit this really key fact.
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This got modded up as informative?
No, they did not die young. They survived well into their 80's and 90's as well. I had a great-great grandfather that broke his hip jogging at 99 years of age. Anytime he gained too much weight he fasted it off for a week and resumed his eating with a giant bowl of buttermilk and biscuits.
The survival rates back then are heavily skewed by several things but it is absurd to hold the idea that most of them died young. When they advertised that the median age was 40 that i
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Yes, they did die young. Some exceptional individuals lived to very old ages. Many died in infancy. But even if you survived to five years, adulthood, or whatever age, your life expectancy in the past was much less than it is now.
https://ourworldindata.org/lif... [ourworldindata.org]
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A lot of people seem to think that the body is stupid enough to start breaking down healthy muscle tissue first,
From what I recall when I read a lot in to intermittent fasting, your body doesn't start to break down the muscle until after around 28 hours or so. Depending on activity level.
So a day of fasting isn't going to hurt most regular lazy people who don't do much more strenuous activity than lifting a burger to their mouth.
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Saying the body is "breaking down muscle" is misleading.
The body produces HGH during fasting to preserve muscle mass. It would be more accurate to say that the body is finding two worn out muscle cells and creating one fresh new one.
There are a lot of things that go into what a body does during fasting, but the results are quite positive. Activity levels during Fasting have little to do with anything, it will be your metabolism characteristics that is important. Sure if you have been active BEFORE fastin
Re:Fasting (Score:4, Informative)
There are plenty of fasting studies. Here are just a couple, they really are easy to find if you are smart enough to conduct searches.
https://www.health.harvard.edu... [harvard.edu]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
But I am betting you would rather just be a load of horseshit rather than educate yourself before opening you horseshit mouth and spewing shit.
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IIUC, the evidence has been equivocal on the benefits of fasting in humans. (It works well with mice and rats, but primates are significantly different.)
There have been multiple studies, with various results. None of the ones I've encountered have been as specific about the mechanism as you are, and I really wonder if you have any support for your theory. Do you have references? (And some of the studies did not support that intermittent fasting was valuable.) There are lots of different definitions of
Re:Fasting: One meta-analysis (Score:2)
One meta-analysis of intermittent fasting:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
You will note that it largely supports it, but with very significant caveats. There are other results, but the studies are, IFAICT, inconclusive. If you are healthy enough it seems to usually assist in moderate weight loss...but so does just cutting out sugars and limiting starches...and that latter technique puts less stress on the body (and is easier to maintain...which is a significant benefit in-and-of itself).
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I also wonder if a low protein diet can trigger this process of breaking down dross, and conversely if a high protein diet slows it down.
anti-aging is unloved (Score:1)
It's odd that on a website where users regularly plan out the future of the entire species on million-year time-spans covering most of the visible universe, claiming the species is entitled to consume all visible resources because computers got better, somehow we'll achieve this with bodies that age and fall apart in a handful of decades.
In a universe billions of years old and billion of light years across.
We'll send pot-bellied balding far-sighted middle-aged men farting and snoozing their way across the v
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We love letting someone/something else be the 'bad guy'. We know that indefinite lifespans would cause a huge resource problem. As it stands, old age is the bad guy that comes to kill us off. We can hate it but at the same time, it saves us from making potentially horrible decisions about how to deal with a new normal of no old age to kill us off.
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Because it's biblical, so surely it *must* be a good target. Somewhere in there, it was declared that humans shall live to a maximum of 120 years (I forget where exactly, maybe in the aftermath of Noah's flood).
Of course, our modern reality is not described particularly well by a thousands-of-years-old collection of personal journals of questionable authenticity, let alone constrained by it. According to Wiki, Jeanne Calment [wikipedia.org] made it to 122½ years old, makign her the oldest person on record, whose bir
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Because it's biblical, so surely it *must* be a good target. Somewhere in there, it was declared that humans shall live to a maximum of 120 years (I forget where exactly, maybe in the aftermath of Noah's flood).
Genesis 6:3. But it's not talking about the age of individuals, God is proclaiming that he was going to wipe out humankind in 120 years. It was before the flood, and God decided to spare Noah and his family. Specifically Noah was stated to have lived to 950, and his grandson (born after the flood) was stated to have lived for 438 years. So just on self-referential grounds that 120 years can not be taken to mean an individual's lifespan.
There's a passage in Psalms 90:10 that talks about how people would
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There are a lot of middle aged US astronauts. The average age is 34, and increasing.
Not many of them are pot bellied. Physical fitness is important. So is knowledge and skill, the kind you acquire through long study and experience.
All nucleotides? I hope not. (Score:1)
The letter A (a.k.a. ATP) pretty much drives all enzymatic reactions in cells.
Woody Allen's idea about dying: (Score:5, Funny)
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Mostly the people predicting the assocation of long life with a decline into existential ennui and ultimately madness need a brisk jog, a bowl of oatmeal, and to never, ever have anything to do with what passes for modern western non-STEM academia, its literature, or its frankly ludicrous intellectual output. It will, to future generations, be collectively known as "the embarrassment" and will result in the correct relegation of "professors" in the field to social standing more worthy of their achievements,
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I wish I had points right now!
By the same token, those people who fear bringing children into a world they think is dying are exactly the people who should not be having babies. Please die childless, apocalyptics, so you have no influence on a new generation. The future is for people who believe we have one.
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Try it sometime. Death is the ultimate unknown, and usually the only people who truly wish to end it all are in great pain. Nearly all cases of failed suicide the person who tired say they immediately regretted the attempt.
Most people who are living long lives today are wearing out their bodies and minds. The whole goal is to keep yourself living well, longer. Of course there are a lot of people who want you to live longer and healthier so you can work longer too.
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Okay, if you don't find value there, I'll take yours off your hands.
Just make a list for me of your interesting associates before then, for... negotiation purposes.
Thanks.
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Of the three listed, I think an argument could be made about heart disease, but the other two I think have been been associated with old age across cultures for human history.
The table you cite references cardiovascular issues and diabetes.
While it may be good to keep an eye on nutrition, it would be silly to pretend that people didn't get old and die from various things that diet cannot prevent.
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Um, no. All it means is that it'll take longer for human mortality to reach a steady state. Your supposition assumes that humankind will stop dying of all other causes i.e. disease, accidents, murders, etc., and assuming that third-world baby factories won't get their shit together.
Plus, after looking up some stats, 1% of Earth's land is taken by cities, about 36% for agriculture, livestock, and all other human activities, and 29% of the surface is uninhabitable. The remaining 34%? Forests and shrubbery
From TFA: We can get rid of coal ... (Score:3)
... much faster by designing nuclear tidal power plants.
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We already have a cure for aging. No one looks the same as we did 100 years ago and we probably do live longer than a 1000 years ago.
No one complains about hospitals and antibiotics and clean drinking water extending their lifespan!
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We live longer than fifty years ago. Probably twenty as well, in most places.
https://ourworldindata.org/lif... [ourworldindata.org]
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You will then find that everybody tends to get more conservative as they gain experience with life, especially if as this happens they gain things that are worth conserving.
With this new tech, we will have younger and healthier conservatives. Muahahahahaha!
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Sorry grandpa, you confused a generational population bulge of conservatives with people getting conservative as they age.