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Science

UC Berkeley Study Finds Diluting Blood Plasma Reverses Aging In Mice (berkeley.edu) 165

Posted by BeauHD from the fountain-of-youth dept.
schwit1 shares a report from Berkeley News: In 2005, University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice -- such that they share blood and organs -- can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research into whether a youngster's blood might contain special proteins or molecules that could serve as a 'fountain of youth' for mice and humans alike. But a new study by the same team shows that similar age-reversing effects can be achieved by simply diluting the blood plasma of old mice -- no young blood needed.

In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin -- where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed -- has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. Performing the same procedure on young mice had no detrimental effects on their health. This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood. schwit1 adds: "Does this mean donating blood helps?"
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UC Berkeley Study Finds Diluting Blood Plasma Reverses Aging In Mice More

UC Berkeley Study Finds Diluting Blood Plasma Reverses Aging In Mice

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  • Blood letting is back! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @10:44PM (#60196012)
    This is certainly better than the "vampire the young" method. The article doesn't mention what effect this has on the humans who have already done this for other reasons than just age. Do they show signs of getting younger? New word of the day: plasmapheresis.
    • This article isn't talking about blood letting, or allowing whole blood to be wasted and not replaced. It's more like dialysis, except there is no net loss of blood during the plasma dilution process.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      This is certainly better than the "vampire the young" method.

      But so much less story material. Another opportunity wasted, damn these scientists.

    • Re:Blood letting is back! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @07:25AM (#60196810)

      The problem is mice are not always a good analog for humans.
      For one thing we are thousands of times more massive. However our blood cells are about the same size.
      A major artery for a mouse is about the size of a minor vane for a human.
      I can see how diluting the blood in a mouse in a lab environment where they don't need to be highly active, could extend their life. However I don't think it will scale well to humans.

      • Re:Blood letting is back! (Score:5, Funny)

        by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @09:01AM (#60197096)

        I can see how diluting the blood in a mouse in a lab environment where they don't need to be highly active, could extend their life.

        Too bad people, especially Americans, are so highly active because this really had potential. I guess I should have known, as this is slashdot which is well known for the physical get up and go attitude.

      • The hypothesis forwarded in one of the articles is that some of the substances in aged plasma inhibit the proper operation of blood, and reducing the concentration of those damaging substances allows proper operation to resume. Since most people can make new plasma in adequate quantities, the benefits of removing some of the bad stuff outweigh potential disadvantages.

        To put it simply, they're removing poison from the blood and replacing it with good stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsa ( 15680 )

      "The article doesn't mention what effect this has on the humans who have already done this for other reasons than just age"

      Who cares! Tonight I'll attach the tap in the bathroom to my vain, and when I wake up I'l be -112!

      • "The article doesn't mention what effect this has on the humans who have already done this for other reasons than just age"

        Who cares! Tonight I'll attach the tap in the bathroom to my vain, and when I wake up I'l be -112!

        Add some bleach to the line from the tap to your vein while you are at it. Might as well be immune to Corona virus as well.

      • Geez. First jellomizer spells it "vane", and now you spell it "vain". It's vein .

    • I've heard people who donate blood frequently do better healthwise... apparently, the benefit is from iron reduction.

  • It's UC Berkeley (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They identify as younger, and demand the right to compete in maze tists with the newborn mice, even with no treatment. Any other handling is "abliest" and the old rodents in charge of the labs need to "check their privilege".

  • Bleach (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:19PM (#60196088)

    How about including bleach in the dilution? It can't hurt. What do you have to lose?

  • Yet another way to prolong the lives of Mice. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:23PM (#60196092) Homepage

    Wild mice live about 1 year. Lab mice live upto 3 years. The record holder, a single Genetically engineered mouse, lived 5 years.

    I am sure this method of life extension will allow Mice to live as long as 10 years.

    It might even let humans live as long as 20 years.

    Somehow I do not think anyone is that interested in learning how to live to reach the ripe old age of 20.

  • "stick his nose in our business"

  • Some researchers sure sound like sadistic little bastards.

    • Re:making "conjoined twins out of young and old mi (Score:4, Funny)

      by TheInternetGuy ( 2006682 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @12:00AM (#60196148)
      I mean you could probably make a business model out of this. Imagine if you will for the truly rich, a toddler in a sleek backpack, circulatory system conjoined with the bearer, constantly filtering old blood in young organs. Depending on how rough your lifestyle is, you'll probably need to come in for a replacement toddler 'cartridge' once every few weeks.

      /s (needed because the internet isn't what it once was anymore)
      • Annnnnd this is why we need regulations to reign in capitalism.
        • You want to make it impossible for someone to profit by saving another person's life.
      • There's always a risk of a dangerous immune response for your idea. Better to extract some of your own cells, select the good ones, clone a large number, and put them back where they belong.

  • Excess Iron? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:59PM (#60196146)

    https://www.mayoclinic.org/dis... [mayoclinic.org]

    It's the most common genetic 'abnormality' that causes notable health side effects. Not really noticeable until older age, it involves the digestive system just absorbing more iron than usual - this buildup over 30 years or so starts showing symptoms in the liver first - but is treated the same way - by repeat blood draws to leech off the iron in the bloodstream and organs over time.

    Perhaps the same or similar effect happens on general populations whose digestive systems simply get worse as filtering out metals as they get older, which ends up fixed with the same leeching process.

    It also makes sense that mice with proportionally less tissues to build up in, but a higher metabolism would build up the same way.

    Ultimately though, who knows if any of it works the same between mice and humans. Just thought the process sounded familiar from relatives that have that common-ish condition.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      ", who knows if any of it works the same between mice and humans. "

      Barbars knew hundreds of years ago. A good blood letting will fix ya right up. How about a shave with that?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      My GP described it as the mutation makes your body think it's chronically short of iron - so it becomes very good at absorbing iron from all sources, including those with poor bio-availability. That iron gets stored into various organs - spleen, liver, heart, and brain - where, if the levels get high enough, it does irreversible damage.

      I've had to give up or severely restrict high-iron foods - beef, lamb, goat, venison, eggs, but I've managed to get my levels into the "normal" range purely through diet. It

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      In the case of iron build-up, they remove red blood cells, not plasma. The process of producing new RBCs gives the excess iron somewhere useful to go.

  • Interesting... (Score:3, Funny)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @12:03AM (#60196154)

    Does this mean Hillary and Bill can release the children locked in their cellar now?

  • Aging and telomere chains (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @12:32AM (#60196204)

    I find no reference to telomere chains in the article or the full text of the paper. Those have long been thought to be measurements of your true age - every time yours cells divide, telomere ends become shorter.

    Does this approach actually rejuvenate them? Otherwise it's not really addressing a root cause. Although if we can increase the average age by 20 years, it would still be quite huge development.

    • Hayflick Limit / Genesis 6:3

      Agreed on 120 years (two significant digits). Quite the "primitive nomad", maybe I can get him to do my stock picks.

      A toast to Saint Jeanne Calment, while I'm at it.

      • Hold on, lemme verify that data real quick, to distiguis it from any other thing I made up just this morning . . .

        . . . oh wait, I can't!

        Because religion is bullshit!
        -- Conformal Cyclic Cosmology 01:01

        • I'll consider that when you successfully predict the maximum age of a human for the -next- 2500 years.

          Oh wait, only I will be able to check your accuracy, between the two of us. Give it a try anyway.

    • Aging is like many components of a machine falling apart at the same time. Rejuvenation will likely be made of multiple attacks. Perhaps cleaning up bad stuff from blood, like in this article, addition of new hormones or other signalling molecules, organ transplants, brain augmentation with stem cells and computer implants, etc. Not sure how teleomeres could be regrown though.
      • When you refer to rejuvenation being made up of multiple attacks, do you think Diet and Exercise could work, or are we going to continue to label that Blasphemy as we struggle to find a cure for laziness? Just curious...
        • If diet and exercise were all that’s needed we would have at least some people still alive after thousands of years. Those will only take you so far, and only if your body is able to tolerate them.

          • If diet and exercise were all that’s needed we would have at least some people still alive after thousands of years. Those will only take you so far, and only if your body is able to tolerate them.

            Speaking of taking you only so far, we seem to be overlooking the most important human organ.

            Until this world gets far less fucked up for humans in general, the human mind will die FAR before a body feeding on some fountain of youth will. Seeking immortality or even age reversing seems stupid and futile. Older humans finding themselves less and less compatible with the world around them as they age, isn't exactly some theory we're still struggling to prove. Ironically enough, suicide will likely become v

    • Re:Aging and telomere chains (Score:5, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:05AM (#60196348) Journal

      Does this approach actually rejuvenate them? Otherwise it's not really addressing a root cause

      Telomere shortening isn't the root cause of aging, and telomerase is a long-known way to lengthen them. Look it up on Wikipedia. Here, I'll help you [wikipedia.org].

  • I've always wondered if your body is really able to eliminate all the unwanted garbage that builds up inside itself. This would appear to show that the answer is "no", i.e., that a certain amount of unwanted garbage does build up. If that's verified, and they can identify the unwanted waste products, some useful treatments may genuinely be possible.

    In the meantime: maybe our ancestors weren't totally crazy, with the idea of bleeding patients :-)

    • Re:Bring back bleeding! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:07AM (#60196354) Journal

      I've always wondered if your body is really able to eliminate all the unwanted garbage that builds up inside itself.

      You can help it. Your lymphatic system needs your movement to circulate and move the "bad stuff" out of your body. Exercising increases the circulation and helps clean it out.

      • Your lymphatic system needs your movement to circulate and move the "bad stuff" out of your body. Exercising increases the circulation and helps clean it out.

        Well, yes, but - how does it actually get out? There are basically only two routes: urination (kidneys) and defecation (intestines). If any waste products are not able to follow one of those routes, they won't be eliminated. Of course, your liver also plays a huge role, since it transforms some waste products into forms that can be eliminated - but eve

        • Re: Bring back bleeding! (Score:4, Informative)

          by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @03:41AM (#60196522) Journal
          Also out your mouth, you breathe it out.
        • Since you can drug test someone from their hair, I suppose binding things in hair or skin which then slough would be another avenue.
        • Well, also through the skin as sweat. Basically the same ingredients as in urine, but in different ratios.

          I'm pretty sure that if waste builds up in a cell, eventually the cell dies and dumps it all out. It may even be part of how red blood cells work as they're only intended to last about a month, though I could be completely wrong.

  • Whoa. You mean Elizabeth Bathory [medicalbag.com] actually almost got it right when she was bathing in the blood of young virgins?

  • A study, which proves every alcoholic right... diluting your blood keeps you young!

  • So, once again our brilliant scientists have found that nature is an idiot. Right.

    • Well, yeah, have you seen the "design" of the eye? It is!

      The damn CCD chip is mounted *backwards*!
      And the lens is so shit, that it would be as useless as a $3 camera in the 80s witout heavy post-processing! ^^

  • " ...exposure to a young systemic environment" means we sewed together two mice. Think. About. That.

    Now we reduced the plasma in an mouse's blood. Systematically. And we watched what would happen. How low can we go? Think. About. That.

    If there were some kind of first principles that medicine or biology worked from (as say physics does) _maybe_ you could justify this. But the researchers don't know. Their discoveries are surprises not part of any kind reasoning. What kind of soulless person even co

    • How it was described in popular media may differ from the goal of the experiment as it was described for the review board. Re-examining your data set for weird things afterward is just a way to get extra benefits out of the research. Anyhow, while the sewing part would've got scrutiny from the review board, harvesting plasma is extremely common in any research with humans or animals. It would be weird not to harvest any plasma or serum in the course of an animal study.

    • Thought about it . . . they're mice. I don't really care.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      What? In the second experiment they effectively performed dialysis on an old mouse. Dialysis is one of the most common medical treatments in humans.

      In the first experiment they used a young mouse to perform the "dialysis". This is also a reasonable thing to do, particularly as a first step, since any artificial manipulation you do won't replicate everything a living metabolism does.

      I can assure you, ethics committees do not take kindly to "we just want to see what will happen."

      Regarding physics, how do you

  • So Bart Simpson's blood wasn't needed after all?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      So Bart Simpson's blood wasn't needed after all?

      I came for a "Simpsons Did It" joke and was not disappointed.

  • More water = less of everything else per liter of blood, right? Is removing the old plasma what does the trick, or is it that adding water helps flush everything out?
    • They added albumin so that they weren't changing the isotonic properties of the blood, so it was more that they were removing/diluting factors in the blood plasma.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Drinking more water will not dilute your blood. You'll just pee it away. While urine does carry away some waste products, there's a point beyond which you aren't excreting more of anything but water. Unless you are dehydrated, drinking more water isn't going to benefit you in any way.

      You might be *more* successful diluting your blood by simply increasing your salt intake.

      However describing what the researchers did as "dilution" is a bit misleading. They actually removed half of the mice's plasma and rep

  • Everyone should donate blood! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Terje Mathisen ( 128806 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @07:32AM (#60196822)

    (Full disclosure: I have been a blood donor for 45 years, since the day I turned 18 and was allowed to volunteer.)

    For most of this time I have been donating whole blood (A-, Kell- and a few other factors which are less important), but for nearly 10 years I donated plasma instead: The main difference is that you can donate blood up to 4 times a year but plasma is fine once a month, and from this article it seems like replacing your plasma volume every year would be a good idea.

    Personally, the only effect I have noticed is that I'm significantly out of shape for 2-4 weeks after each donation, until my hgb levels are back up, but if this article can get a lot more people to donate, that would be a _very_ good result. :-)

    Terje

    • Personally, the only effect I have noticed is that I'm significantly out of shape for 2-4 weeks after each donation, until my hgb levels are back up,

      Me too - but every time I've asked about it the nurses tell me everything should be normal within three days. What sort of sports do you do? I'm a regular (non-competitive) swimmer, and my lap times and endurance dip significantly for about two weeks after I give...

      • I'm a competitive orienteer, running a lot of competitions in a normal year. My record was from 2018 when I completed 105 races, with an average running time of about 40 min. I've won my class in the national (Norwegian) champs a few times but never been close to the podium in the World Masters Orienteering Championship.

        I believe the main problem is that I'm normally 10% below the reference hgb level, even though I take iron supplements all the time, so when they remove a (british) pint of blood I drop belo

  • I'd be interested to know (for the mouse model) if this "reset" is like a shift back in timeline, or if it's more temporary. That is, in a super naive picture, if dilution brought the mouse effective age from 3 years to 2 years based on plasma chemistry (like pro-inflammatory protein concentrations), will it be another full year before the mouse is back to an effective age of 3 years? Or do those aging markers in the plasma go back to pre-dilution levels more quickly (or more slowly)?

    Of course there are a

  • In the future, rich people will buy young people's bodies

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

  • Good news/bad news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @09:10AM (#60197122)

    Good news: Diluting the plasma of a mouse may give it twice the lifespan of a normal mouse
    Bad news: Diluting the plasma of a human may give it twice the lifespan of a normal mouse

  • I mean *half* the blood sounds like quite a lot of oxygen transport capacity to compensate for. Might be dangerous to people with weak red blood cells or other oxygen transport problems.

    • Red blood cells do the oxygen transport, but they talked about replacing half the plasma, which doesn't include red blood cells. This article [wikipedia.org] says that centrifuges are usually used to separate the plasma from the rbcs.

  • I can't wait to see the beauty supply companies start selling leeches as some miraculous cure.

    What next - weight loss companies selling tapeworms?

  • ... simply owing to the fact that it would be blatantly unethical to try and test this on humans, I wouldn't look forward to seeing how it might translate to reversing aging in humans in the lifetime of anyone currently living.

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