Sight restored by turning back the epigenetic clock
nature.com
nature.com
Experimental "foo" results in NN% improvement in "quux" in new study. Possible human trials scheduled for "someday far far away" and could "one day" lead to rainbow colored pet unicorns for all humans.
Basically, some amazing thing may happen someday and I'll never hear about it and will likely be dead and gone well before it bears fruit.
It would be wonderful if there was a site that summarized these kinds of breakthrough research projects in a way that was practical for laypeople. E.g. disease, research being done, possible treatment/cure, stage of testing, availability to general public / how to get it or become part of trial group, cost, risks etc. E.g. I'd love to be able to star & watch this like a Github repo and be notified of progress...
https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-audiobook/dp/B07QGH1Q43/ref=...
Very interesting research in that book but honestly, very little actionable paths for the reader. We aren't yet to a point where it's possible to just pop a pill and live another 100 years. Probably the most effective thing you can do right now is caloric restriction, but that can kind of suck. The holy grail would be some way to eat normally, and slow the aging process.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200615115724.h...
Which sort of indicates that it is not young blood per se that plays the important role, but dilution and removal of "something" that accumulates with age.
Albumin is expensive, at least so far, no one thought about an industrial method to produce large quantities, because there was no demand for them. Aside from price, no ethical problems there.
Also, frequent blood donors tend to be much more healthy. A study from Kuopio, Finland, showed that they are almost immune to heart attacks:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9737556/
Ofc, the question of causality is strong here, no doubt. But maybe - if the body of a blood donor is forced to produce new blood frequently, might this new blood be "healthier" or "younger" in some sense.
I'm probably too cautious of a person but I tend to not trust other people to exercise appropriate caution themselves. Intimate proximity to a nurse taking blood, seems like a bad idea right now.
> try to reduce inflammation
Avoid the obvious things (alcohol, drugs) but also your diet has a huge effect on systemic inflammation. It's one theory as to why caloric restriction works. Simply eating less, means less inflammation.
But WHAT you eat also matters. As it turns out, SUGAR is highly inflammatory. To a lesser extent, complex carbohydrates are too.
So if you're really interested in longevity consider not just eating less, but eating less sugar (and by extension, carbohydrates).
If you ask me that sucks. Part of living life, is enjoying good food. And as it happens, a lot of good food is full of fat and sugar. I moderate and I don't eat a lot of it, but to think I would need to basically cut all of it out just to live another frail 10 years doesn't seem worth it to me.
Some compounds promote hunger, notably THC found in marijuana. Yet, as far as I know, chronic marijuana users are not living substantially longer lives? Then again, the hunger effect probably also diminishes as ones tolerance increases.
but i'm interested in the biomedical applications from obscure species that feature bioluminescence, magic pheromones and how to test the quality of Eel I just put on back order.
i loved your italicized block. don't down vote this one.
Maybe these things bear fruit, maybe they don't, but at least now we know about them, and maybe it'll inspire someone somewhere.
I rarely see any of those articles materialize in a way where I could say "yes, this is something I can get right now". The only one I remember actually making it is the Argus II, and even then there is no way I could afford the $150K price.
Affiliations Department of Genetics, Blavatnik Institute, Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Yuancheng Lu, Xiao Tian, Daniel L. Vera, Qiurui Zeng, Doudou Yu, Michael S. Bonkowski, Jae-Hyun Yang, Michael B. Schultz, Alice E. Kane, Karolina Chwalek, Luis A. Rajman & David A. Sinclair
Department of Neurology, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Benedikt Brommer, Chen Wang, Songlin Zhou & Zhigang He
Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Benedikt Brommer, Anitha Krishnan, Chen Wang, Songlin Zhou, Emma M. Hoffmann, Margarete M. Karg, Ekaterina Korobkina, Meredith S. Gregory-Ksander, Bruce R. Ksander & Zhigang He
Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Anitha Krishnan, Emma M. Hoffmann, Margarete M. Karg, Ekaterina Korobkina, Meredith S. Gregory-Ksander & Bruce R. Ksander
Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Margarita Meer & Vadim N. Gladyshev
Department of Pathology, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA Margarita Meer & Morgan E. Levine
Department of Genetics, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA Noah Davidsohn & George M. Church
Department of Molecular Biology, Cancer Center and Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA Konrad Hochedlinger
Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Steve Horvath
Laboratory for Ageing Research, Department of Pharmacology, School of Medical Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia David A. Sinclair
Kind of sick joke, considering I spent almost a decade of my career doing computational imaging and computer vision work.
2020 :/
If it's works, you'd be able to read text again. You'd just need to do it from inside VR. ;)
Diamox fixes my double vision. Before that I was using prism glasses.
I also had quite bad posture during the confinement and wonder if I could have pinched a nerve?
Apparently I had needed glasss for years, and that was the final straw.
Diamox was almost an over night fix. That’s when I put it together. I had to dig like crazy to learn about cranial pressure and sixth nerve.
Eye doctors were all clueless on it. Even Neurlogist mostly were.
https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9370-hacking_how_we_see
I printed out a Presbyopia chart (http://www.robert-silverman.net/presbeninst.htm) that was linked on HN awhile back and started using a Brock string. Figured I'd do those until the pandemic is over and I can get some professional vision therapy.
Guess I'll pick up a magic eye poster too. At least it'll be more fun than staring at a string for five minutes.
Btw, there is even a magic eye tetris out there. Playable only when one is proficient at seeing magic eye images.
The thrill of being able to restore these two things alone would be indescribable.
Your eye has "extra flexibility" to focus at birth (that is, it can focus beyond infinity and nearer than is useful), but it slowly hardens and becomes less flexible. Around age 40-50 is when you really start to notice the loss in range, assuming you had something close to a normal balance between distance and near vision to begin with.
Later, transparency is lost in the cornea for similar reasons and we get cataracts.
Then with cataract surgery you can choose your preferred focal length for your new stiff artificial lens.
Could be selection bias - the unhealthy with poor eyesight could have quit or fallen off a ledge.
I don't need reading glasses. One reason is I have one eye with a slightly near refractive error and one with a slightly far refractive error. They're also both pretty close to nominal, so losing a bit of range on focusing doesn't hurt as much as if I'd been biased one way or another.
I do notice that I prefer slightly larger text than before. I bet if I tried reading glasses that I'd find that they lend some benefit.
Probably the eyes need some training too, refocusing onto near and far objects frequently. We live in a computer screen world, this is very unnatural for our eyes.
I am 42 and I started experimenting with NMN, NR and resveratrol in January.
My eyesight measurably improved, by about 1,25 dp, within weeks (I am shortsighted since childhood.) I no longer notice any eye strain even after looking into screens for hours. My very, very mild presbyopia disappeared. Also, I believe that I can see colors much more brightly, but this is something that cannot be measured easily, if at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_mononucleotide
Both are NAD+ boosters, but the science is far from settled. Bioavailability is a huge open question.
https://blog.insidetracker.com/nr-nmn-longevity-supplements-...
It's very exciting that we are beginning to unravel a general mechanism that drives aging across species.
Not what the drugs were intended to treat. But a surprisingly effect.
2 dozen doctors had not been able to help me.
Oh you have anxiety. Take some anti-depressants.
Umm doctor my entire right side is completely numb.
Doctor: see a neurologist. Umm that’s a 3 month wait.
Neurologist. Take this pill call me in six months. We got about 10 meds to get through before I can start on the good ones.
Now I may have had less problems if I had taken the baby aspirin like I was supposed to. As that is a mild blood thinner.
Have increased cranial pressure. Makes eyes want go double. 5th or sixth nerve gets weak.
Diamox lowers pressure. Nerves work better, double vision goes away. Prism glasses help if I’m having a bad time.
Other issue was black disc / hallucinations in vision.
Doctors found I had a genetic clotting disorder. Only found due to clots showing up elsewhere in body.
Blood thinners are standard treatment. Aside from double vision all my eye Problems went away in a few days. So basically eye mini strokes.
Everything comes back whenever I try and go off meds.
How did you discover you had increased cranial pressure?
They removed some fluid to Lower pressure. Massive difference in symptoms. Lasted about a year. Diamox lowers pressure now.
Reddit has /r/iih a good place for learning.
Introducing the factors capable of reprogramming cells into a living animal may produce effects akin to stem cell therapy by converting a small number of cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, followed by stem cell signaling that beneficially affects tissue health more broadly. Alternatively, many cells may have their epigenetic markers reset to a more youthful state without losing their identity to become induced pluripotent stem cells. Or both. Beyond this, there is certainly the threat of cancer or structural damage to tissue through the conversion of too many cells, and this class of therapy will require careful development to ensure safety, even as the mouse data continues to look quite interesting.
David Sinclair has been pushing an epigenetic-centric view of aging of late, with analogies to information systems and computing. The most interesting part of the the supporting work suggests that DNA repair of double strand breaks has the side-effect of driving alteration of the epigenome in characteristic ways with age. That will be an important connection between stochastic nuclear DNA damage and deterministic global effects throughout the body, should the evidence continue to hold up.
As this illustrates, however, epigenetic change is a downstream issue in aging, a reaction to events and a changing environment, not a first cause. Fixing it may or may not turn out to be particularly useful in the broader picture of aging, depending on exactly where it sits in the web of cause and consequence. As a comparable example, hypertension is a major downstream issue in aging. It is far removed from root causes such as cross-link formation and inflammation, but is also a proximate cause of many forms of further dysfunction, such as pressure damage to delicate tissues in the brain. Controlling hypertension without addressing its causes is both possible and beneficial - but the benefits are limited by the fact that those root causes are still there, chewing away at the body in a thousand other ways.
But the very cool thing is there is no reason to believe that this technique couldn't eventually be used throughout the whole body.
UNR844-Cl claims to restore flexibility to the aging lens by breaking the disulfide bonds that form between proteins in the lens. It's a really simple molecule too, composed of common supplements(lipoic acid and choline), so it looks like the risk is fairly low.
Currently people with presbyopia who get laser eye surgery have one eye corrected for looking at nearby objects and the other for those which are far away - this works, but is not ideal.
With UNR844 one could potentially have the same typeof correction in both eyes.
https://www.healio.com/news/optometry/20201012/further-study...
https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/frequency-therapeu...
Maybe because I included (in mice) in the title, it didn't get upvoted as much as this post.
Maybe because I included (in mice) in the title, it didn't get upvoted as much as this post.
I've heard the claim when calorie limiting applied to wild mice, they ... just die - they already have limited calories.
But just that leap might be a decent lesson.
"The authors found that OSK expression enhanced axon regrowth and cell survival in human neurons in vitro."
Granted, that's not actually restoring sight to an in vivo human patient just yet, but neither is it "in mice".
In Mice