Questionable “Young Blood” Transfusions Offered in U.S. As Anti-Aging Remedy
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
It seems like the clinical trial is just an excuse to get around medical regulations, so they can sell snake oil to gullible rich people.
OTOH, I'm not sure what medical regulations they'd be getting around.
The problem is that "young blood" isn't some new drug it's just blood. Once the FDA approves something, they have almost no control over how a legally practicing doctor administers the treatment. Various ethics and medical boards, depending on the jurisdiction, have authority to ban the doctor from practicing medicine but blood transfusions are such a common thing and liability is always enforceable so it's hard to justify here. Done properly the risk of complications is small and there are proven treatments to many of the rare issues. I think this treatment is ridiculous but whether it is clearly unethical I think falls to a matter of opinion.
People are vampires farming the remaining humans for their blood.
The stories of her serial murders and brutality are verified by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest.
Stories which ascribe to her vampire-like tendencies (most famously the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth) were generally recorded years after her death and are considered unreliable. Her story quickly became part of national folklore, and her infamy persists to this day.
She is often compared with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and has been nicknamed The Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.
Parabiosis seems to work because you're basically using the young mouse as a breathing dialysis unit for the older mouse, not because there's any secret sauce in their blood per se.
The evidence that it does work already exists:
"When Wyss-Coray’s team tried a simpler experiment than parabiosis—giving old mice injections of plasma from young mice—they saw similar effects on the hippocampal neurons. The old mice also performed significantly better than untreated animals on tests of learning and memory."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/young-blood-renews-ol...
Science (natual ones) can't prove anything, only disprove the hypothesis.
Science's default position is "we don't know" or "there's no evidence", not "it doesn't work".
In this case, the phenomena are "administering treatment" and "seeing positive results".
If the null hypothesis is accurate, and there is no relationship between treatment and outcomes, then it doesn't work. So yes, that is indeed science's default position.
"Clinical tests" is a wide range of studies, and initially may indeed be 'simple' placebo controlled studies. If an effect is seen, then testing will be done with 'various degrees' to determine a dose response, etc.
Sometimes people do the work to prove things wrong.
I initially wanted to make this comment sarcastically, but really, if we become capable of regrowing organs within your body you could legitimately make a business case for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplantation#Living_d...
In a typical adult recipient LDLT, 55 to 70% of the liver (the right lobe) is removed from a healthy living donor. The donor's liver will regenerate approaching 100% function within 4–6 weeks, and will almost reach full volumetric size with recapitulation of the normal structure soon thereafter. It may be possible to remove up to 70% of the liver from a healthy living donor without harm in most cases. The transplanted portion will reach full function and the appropriate size in the recipient as well, although it will take longer than for the donor.
"Compared to the general public, most kidney donors have equivalent (or better) survival, excellent quality of life, and no increase in end-stage kidney disease"
https://nhsbtdbe.blob.core.windows.net/umbraco-assets/1433/1... [PDF, page 7]
To know if there is an effect, you need to not compare to the general public, but to a subset similar in factors which are associated with the outcome measures to kidney donors.
In the case of the approach being trialed here by Ambrosia, I think our expectations should be low, and the outcome I expect is for there to be no significant benefit. The only ethical question worthy of consideration is whether those involved then do the right thing: publish the data, shut up shop, and move on to the next project - having done the good work of finding out that there is no large effect here. Transfusions of young blood to old individuals are not producing benefits in mice, and there is reason to think that the beneficial outcomes observed in old mice due to parabiosis, the linking of circulatory systems between an old and a young individual, are due to factors or circumstances not replicated by periodic transfusion. It isn't difficult to imagine that beneficial outcomes require the youthful system reacting in a dynamic way to the presence of aged signals, for example, or - as suggested by some researchers recently - that it is nothing more than a consistently maintained dilution of problem signals in the aged environment.
If the problem really is "This area doesn't have enough money", then the same money being used to buy into the trial could have funded a proper double-blind trial.
And this is from the perspective of someone who does support the use of non-randomized evidence in medicine.
Telomeres, lifestyle, cancer, and aging:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/
Better choice of diet and activities has great potential to reduce the rate of telomere shortening or at least prevent excessive telomere attrition, leading to delayed onset of age-associated diseases and increased lifespan.
Or at least used it as a loofah.
Alternatively, maybe the idea pitched to research institutions was knocked back as unethical or showed little scientific merit?