A blood factor can rejuvenate the aging brain | Hacker News Reader

A blood factor can rejuvenate the aging brain

insideprecisionmedicine.com

88 pointssinak26 comments

Just discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37163684 (123 comments)

Remarkable that a single blood factor can have such a big impact on brain inflammation, plasticity, and cognition. Curious if PF4 levels naturally decline with age or if other factors cause the drop?

Is exercise enough then?

Yes but they really ought to do this study with people before we all go out and exercise :).

Why not just exercise?

Potential for injury, respiratory illness, space limitations, disability. Not everyone has the privilege.

Yeah, my Dad is too frail to exercise.

Inactivity is a far bigger health risk than exercise

I was joking. Seriously, people should just exercise in a manner that they can do it consistently for the present and future health. There are physical and mental benefits in many different types of studies. The only exceptions are people with rare diseases that prevent normal body function with exercise. The mechanism by which this benefits mice may not be the same in humans but that's no reason to not exercise.

I have chronic fatigue and while cardio can cause a lot if problems, weight training has been beneficial. And if you look at my routine you would laugh as it is about half the time other people spend in the gym. I am there twice a week for 50 minutes and most is rest time. Often there is an exercise you can do a bit more of, unless you are very sick. It is more linear than people think: you don’t need to choose from the binary: sedate/marathon runner pair.

You really need to combine exercise with a blood boy for the best effects.

Let's goooooo! Inject some of that into humans and see what happens!!!!

"Research led by two teams from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and a team from the University of Queensland, Australia, has identified a blood factor as the common denominator behind rejuvenation of the brain through young blood transfusion, a longevity hormone and exercise."

Musk, Thiel, and their ilk are going to put us in Bug Jack Barron territory before the end of the decade, aren't they?

that seems rather optimistic. more like plasma center/day care in low income neighborhoods.

would you blame a parent for taking their kid somewhere that gave them a good education, fed them well, and paid you, for just a little bit of their excess life force? you gotta weigh the pros and cons together. one man’s college education is another man’s immortality. everyone wins, just, not everyone wins as much.

Ira Levin's 'This Perfect Day' has that as one of the central themes.

Of course I wouldn’t blame a parent for making the best of a dystopian kakistocracy to survive. Though I think increasing numbers of people are opting not to become parents to future environmental refugees/peasants/bloodbags in the first place.

Sadly it's the opposite. The people choosing not to become parents are exactly the people who would LEAST become climate refugees.

The vast majority of children today are being born in regions they will have to flee, while the regions they will flee to are hollowing themselves out.

The scenario leans towards a future where the very people who were best positioned to save the world chose not to because the challenge of it made them sad.

>would you blame a parent for taking their kid somewhere that gave them a good education, fed them well, and paid you, for just a little bit of their excess life force?

Yes. It's those compromises that dig into dignity.

And also why people get to only have "excess life force" selling as their route to "good education, food, and payment".

Well, it would make a lot more sense for the wealthy class to have their own stem cells harvested at a young age then cryogenically store those stem cells and use them to seed artificial blood generation systems.

From this perspective, things look different. i.e. less sinister. A holy grail of biomedical genetics is the ability to create whole blood - white cells and all - from a patient's stem cells, as that would eliminate the need for blood transfusions as well as all problems related to any kind of incompatibility. Still seems to be a ways off, as blood generation is another one of those ridiculously complicated biological systems, and is also closely interwoven with the immune system (since pathogens tend to show up and spread via the bloodstream).

Now, maybe the easiest way to do this is with 'Dolly the Sheep' tactics, meaning wealthy people would create clones of themselves and then harvest blood and organs from those clones, as in at least one dystopian movie.

Or just program some bacteria to produce the compound in question like we do for everything else.

So like vampires? Do vampires typically drink the blood or transfuse it to their bloodstream through their teeth?

Vampire bats create a slit in the ankles of sleeping livestock and lick the wound. Their saliva contains an anticoagulant that keeps the wound bleeding. Humanoid vampires are not real despite the goth look still being a thing unless you are referring to the group of people that transfuse blood from young people for a lot of money which I suspect is a scam due to the short life of blood cells especially when stored outside of a human.

Please don’t make the most productive members of our society justify why they need to ingest your blood. You’ll spook the economy which is working great for all of us.

Ok fair enough but then I should be allowed to sell my 3-piece 5G dampening magnet suits.

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