Taming the Flame of Aging: Key Pathway for Chronic Inflammation Revealed | Hacker News Reader

Taming the Flame of Aging: Key Pathway for Chronic Inflammation Revealed

neurosciencenews.com

90 pointsgardenfelder48 comments

I barely understand the actual research so I tried getting Claude 2 100k to walk me through it. It stresses that the findings are primarily important for guiding future research. Interestingly, when I then asked if there are any actions I could take today to avail myself of the findings I got what appears to be some reasonably well aligned suggestions. However, I’m way out of my depth here. Does anybody know if the following (or any part of the following) is sound or for that matter if it’s terrible? Here’s what I got:

“ Here are some potential ways you could apply the findings from this study in your daily life:

Diet: - Eat foods rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds like curcumin (turmeric), catechins (green tea), and anthocyanins (berries) that may help reduce inflammation.

- Consume foods rich in NAD+ precursors like nicotinamide riboside or tryptophan to potentially support mitochondrial function.

- Follow an intermittent fasting regimen, which may enhance mitochondrial health and reduce inflammation.

- Limit foods high in saturated fats, added sugars, and processed carbs that can promote inflammation.

Supplements: - Take supplements that may inhibit cGAS/STING like quercetin, curcumin, green tea extract. However, speak to your doctor first.

- Consider supplements to support mitochondria like CoQ10, nicotinamide riboside, and alpha-lipoic acid.

Lifestyle: - Exercise regularly as it can reduce inflammation, improve mitochondrial function, and stimulate brain plasticity.

- Practice stress reduction techniques like yoga and meditation which may decrease inflammatory genes.

- Get sufficient sleep since sleep deprivation can increase inflammatory cytokines.

- Challenge your brain with cognitively stimulating activities to potentially promote neuroplasticity.

- Quit smoking, as it increases inflammation and oxidative stress.

However, changes should be made cautiously and discussed with a health professional. While the study provides promising areas to target, more research is still needed to confirm effects in humans.”

NAD+ is available in a supplement form very popular in longevity community.

IF/intermittent fasting induces autophagy. Also popular in longevity/health folks. Our diets are so poor, I wonder if the benefit comes from eating less or by sticking to a feeding window. But the evidence is for it. It can't hurt you as long as you meet your nutritional requirement during your feeding window.

>Limit foods high in saturated fats, added sugars, and processed carbs that can promote inflammation. Most metabolic diseases first line of treatment is diet modification.

>cGAS/STING like quercetin, curcumin, green tea extract. However, speak to your doctor first. Do talk to you doctor. Quercetin metabolism does interfere with hormone (I know in men) But it is inflammatory. Green tea extract could hurt kidney so be careful with the source.

>CoQ10, nicotinamide riboside, and alpha-lipoic acid CoQ10 is a co-enzyme recommended for heart patients. In healthy adults it can't hurt. Alpha lipoic acid is an essential fatty acid. Salmon/tuna is rich in it or also available in supplement. Do take a quality source because most fatty acid supplement is rancid which can cause more harm than good

>Exercise regularly makes sense right

>Practice stress reduction techniques like yoga and meditation which may decrease inflammatory genes. stress produces cortisol. Chronic stress causes inflammation.

>Get sufficient sleep Regardless of effect on longevity good sleep will just help you feel better

>sleep deprivation can increase inflammatory cytokines. this is true

>Challenge your brain with cognitively stimulating activities More of a thing for retirees. Thats why they do sudoku puzzles

>Quit smoking That big "smoking kill" signs mandated by FDA is kind of for this reason. Damages the epithelium in your blood vessels and causes MI/stroke. Increases lung cancer. It doesn't apply to just tobacco but anything that can be smoked

To spare you the animated ads, direct link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06373-1

So is there anything left for Mid-2023?

We got AGI, pretty much, (it's artificial, it's general, and fairly intelligent by most standards), and in last few weeks, we might have room temperature superconductors, a cure for cancer, and now a cure for aging?

Can't help but wonder if there's a connection, lol.

They finally start using the tech buried millions of years ago by Who-Who-Must-Not-Be-Mentioned.

Right, I forgot all about the secret UFO recovery program now allegedly coming to light.

Maybe it's all from there, lol.

Perhaps the first generated the next one and so on. Let’s wait for hallucinations now.

Perhaps the rest of the mentioned amazing advancements are the hallucinations...

Don't forget the totally unrelated UFO hearings in congress...

What are you referring to when you say cure for cancer?

I assume this is a reference to e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36982813

It says "tumors", what about cancers that do not involve tumors, like Leukemia.

Liquid cancers are, in comparison, much more treatable. Sometimes they can even be curable.

Maybe they are correlated :) GPT-4 "What types of materials have molecular structures which may lead to room temperature superconductivity?"

Clearly GPTs makes it easier to do research work, what took days now can take hours.

Yes, and sure, you still have to fact check, but that's O(1) per claim. If retrieval is actually happening, and not hallucination, the gains can be huge for a complex query.

That's something that people who dismiss GPT seem to forget.

Hey look, something from DeepMind from a couple years ago talking about using ML to search for new high temp superconductors :-D I'm actually super curious what happens when their models train on what we've learned from LK-99, and maybe it will come up with even cheaper, easier, or higher temp superconductors.

https://www.deepmind.com/blog/simulating-matter-on-the-quant...

Maybe a cure for aging in yeast.

Don't forget aliens!

We haven't in the sleightest found any of those things.

The AI is neither intelligent nor General. The room temp semiconductor has not been replicated yet. The cure for cancer has been in pretrial for 20 years, and only now got accepted for phase 1 testing in humans (just checking is not posionous it has 0 results regarding efficacy). And understanding the mechanisms of inflamation is about as close to figuring out aging as figuring out amyloid plaques got us to cure Alzeihmers.

It is all super encouraging, and new scientific discoveries are exciting, but we are not there yet, and there is a big chance there is a science Winter coming straight after this Summer, and the AI one might be long as we have no new alternatives if the hype behind our current attempts fail

> understanding the mechanisms of inflamation is about as close to figuring out aging as figuring out amyloid plaques got us to cure Alzeihmers

While I agree understanding inflammation is only the very beginning of a long, long journey, comparing it to amyloid plaques is disingenuous: the latter was literally outright fraud. There's no reason (yet, anyway) to think these researchers are literally fraudulent like the Alzheimer's researchers were.

> there is a big chance there is a science Winter coming straight after this Summer

Why? Pure regression to the mean? "Science" is an unfathomably vast enterprise and there's no reason to think a breakthrough in one or two areas must be followed by a quiescence in all others.

Don't get too excited yet, e.g. despite all the posts here about promising battery tech, there is still a lot left to be desired.

You have forgotten fusion. Ignition was less than 12 months ago.

Sounds like we've got really good at building hype for things that don't actually provide evidence of the claims made about them.

Stack of questions with no answers

Cure for cancer, cure for AIDS

We're getting a serious taste of what a hotter earth is like. We can have extended lives to really enjoy the back half of the century

>Researchers have unveiled the key role of the cGAS/STING molecular signaling pathway in driving chronic inflammation and functional decline during aging. The team discovered that blocking the STING protein suppressed inflammatory responses in aging cells and tissues, leading to improved function.

Just my take as a middle aged human watching myself and others age I see a connection with alcohol / inflammation and aging.

From my experience: people who drink frequently age much worse and this could be related to inflammation. Alcohol is obvious poison but even drinking a beer here or there causes inflammation … let’s say you drink one beer a night after work … I think this exacerbates the aging process by leaving the body in constant inflamed state.

This is based on nothing other than my own anecdotal observations

So the next question is, what makes alcohol attractive in the first place and what does it deplete? Maybe the depletions are a clue?

I've only got so many stem cells, so whilst it might seem logical to reduce inflammation to preserve the demand for stem cells, how can I increase my red bone marrow?

Filgrastim is not an answer.

Answers on a Postcard to:-

Puzzlah Towah, Hahvahd Squah

What makes alcohol attractive. In my experience alcohol in many social situations helps people form a connection (cutting through layers of bs we masquerade around with). It helps people break the ice and form a bond .. both as just friends and also with possible love interests.

The issue that I have seen is that we humans form habits (and addictions). So let’s say alcohol helped me make some friends in college and hook up with a lady friend who become a serious romantic long term partner.

Your brain is like yeah .. she alcohol helps… and the inflammation issues take years before you notice any symptoms.

Years later you just now associate alcohol with socializing and good time .. or even associate with relaxation. As you age and life is stressful this can dangerous because now your body has become dependent on this substance for mental relaxation / stress unwinding. Now you find yourself drinking by at home with no love interest and maybe just alone without friends.

Fast forward now you find yourself overweight and having health issues … and your like man cannot believe this is happening to me .. aging sucks and I am unlucky.

Your subconscious and habit do a good job of stopping you from making any connection that perhaps alcohol has been playing a role here.

Side note: I am friends with a couple recovered alcoholics and am just basing my rambling response based on my own life experiences.

Maybe related but Alchohol severely affects sleep quality and adverse sleep quality is known to be linked with inflammations.

Italians drink wine all the time and they age perfectly well. Fit and energetic at the age of 80.

https://www.worlddata.info/life-expectancy.php#by-population

All the top drink like fish. Now hold my beer.

If we're doing anecdotal observations, I'll add one of my own.

At around 40, you start seeing visible signs of aging in most of your same age peers, but the skin elasticity and wrinkles are terrible on those who smoke.

I mean, I knew about it since I was young, but it is still shocking to see.

> More importantly, animals receiving STING inhibitors displayed significant enhancements in spatial and associative memory.

I don't suppose there is some herbal STING inhibitor already available OTC?

There isn't, finding inhibitors (natural or synthetic) that can specifically target STING without disrupting other essential cellular processes is a challenge.

However..

Resveratrol, a natural compound found in grapes and red wine, has been studied for its potential to modulate STING activity, though not the STING protein specifically (from what i can find).

There's also speculation that the gut microbiota plays a role in modulating the immune system and it's possible that certain bacteria could influence STING activity.

Is the key problem here that the inflammation is chronic? My understanding was that inflammation is a very necessary part of the healing process.

I would have thought that blocking the inflammation process would be catastrophic for healing.

I'd imagine there are times when it would be useful. I had assumed that inflammation was more to do with fighting infection than healing, but I may be wrong.

Doesn't inflammation happen when building muscle? Isn't muscle building a healing process?

Inflammation plays a role in stabilizing damaged tissue and accelerating the healing process. This is one reason why the common practice of using ice to treat musculoskeletal injuries probably does more harm than good in most cases.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/go...

Yes, you're correct. You can inhibit inflammation, and some people do, but you'll almost certainly be increasing your risk for cancer and other diseases.

The goal should be to decrease chronic baseline inflammation while maintaining a healthy inflammatory response.

Correct: chronic inflammation is bad, but acute (and often, localised) inflammation is part of the body’s healing mechanism.

First immortal mice when?

When no cats. (-: …okay, maybe a few other requirements.

Let's assume this is confirmed and that tomorrow an inhibitor that also works is found. How many decades from now until one can go to the doctor and get the inhibitor prescribed? Any bets?

In mice

> Using explants of human adipose tissue from individuals with obesity, in whom the adipose tissue accumulates senescent preadipocytes12, we confirmed that STING inhibition by H-151 suppressed the release of proinflammatory signals from senescent cells at the tissue level (Extended Data Fig. 3).

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