Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly | Hacker News Reader

Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

nature.com

149 pointsdtawfik1111 comments

Can someone explain why this is interesting? It looks like a directionally interesting anti-aging study, but without any major breakthroughs. I'm curious what folks upvoting see in the study that I'm missing.

"Remarkably, the microenvironmental change and the functional decline of mid-old cells could be reversed by a young cell-originated protein, SLIT2. Our data identify functional reversion of mid-old cells as a potential method to prevent or ameliorate aspects of aging-related tissue dysfunction."

I think this sounds promising.

So, potentially, we can synthesise this SLIT2 and inject people with a bunch of it?

That is, unfortunately!, not how these things work. But it allows people to do more targeted studies, and (many years of research later) perhaps find a drug that can have some impact.

Or sometimes we get really lucky and just find a food or spice that upregulates/downregulates the right gene or affects the right enzyme (e.g. ginger contains compounds that suppress the inflammation triggering enzyme COX-2 without affecting the related COX-1 enzyme, which is actually beneficial. Most inflammation-reducing drugs affect both).

Although I'm sure we'd have noticed it by now if a food item targeted these genes (assuming they do significantly affect how healthily people age).

Thanks for the ginger example, it was tangential but gave me some ideas :-)

Its further evidence for a hypothesis on the mechanism of aging. Personally I just wanna know how aging works

Don't your telomeres get shorter, your DNA gets damaged and it doesn't replicate correctly anymore? Some animals can be immortal like lobsters but face limits like their physical size can kill them when they molt enough.

I think the consensus is that it’s part of the process, but not the whole picture, but I’m no expert.

Yes, that's one of around 50 currently recognized factors of aging.

I'm not sure if this is one of the consensus primary causes but the most compelling explanation I've heard is capillary damage.

Red blood cells and capillaries have roughly the same diameter leading to constant friction. Your body repairs the capillaries but, given enough time, it makes mistakes. As these mistakes pile up your circulatory system, your body's supply chain, slowly gets less efficient. This leads to every cell in your body gets the energy it needs a little later, and has to hold onto waste for a little longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallmarks_of_aging

This isn't comprehensive, though. I don't see intracellular or extracellular waste accumulation, for instance.

If aging was just DNA errors, wouldn't it be far less consistent in how it effected people?

I hope they'll get on with this research faster. Else it'll be too later - at lest for me personally.

fisetin also helps for senescent cells.

Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, I wasn't intending to provoke.

Formatting wise this is a very poorly made figure. I sincerely hope this is not the current standards for what’s considered to be a good journal nowadays.

Sure, "the" elderly. Everyone who is suffering from aging will be helped. No special treatment for powerful people, it'll be all about "the elderly".

Why throw out the baby with the bath water, just because the rich will live longer, no one should. This is the feeling I get everytime I see a comment that it will be only for the rich and powerful.

I don't think that will be the case, as there will be a gold rush once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers.

It will be more like the crash of prices from the Spanish mines in south America.

Think of all the mundane technology we use every single day that was, when it was first introduced, priced for the rich and powerful.

And then imagine if we'd used that as a reason not to produce it.

Yeah. I wish I had saved the quote, but someone said something along the lines of "the rich get new technologies when they are expensive and sucky; the rest of us get them when the kinks have been ironed out."

If you're worried about the rich getting things unfairly, focus on tax policy and closing all the thousands of loopholes. That's a lifetime's work.

And there is a lot of this sentiment around, specially with young people

> "I don't think that will be the case, as there will be a gold rush once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers."

Maybe; instead when this happens, e.g. hairloss and finasteride, I look at people desperately trying to fight aging and stay young forever and then replacing their worry about hairloss with worry about post-finasteride[1] depression and sexual side effects. Or the people who are obsessed with nootropics ('smart drugs') who are in a hyper-competitive world I don't want to be in at all. Or the people who slather vitamin A creams on their skin to try and look younger who may give themselves retinol burn[2] and Vitamin A, E supplements to look younger which may[3] gives bone pain, liver damage, birth defects, increased risk of fractures, skin irritation, increased risk of prostate cancer.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l5047

[2] https://www.healthline.com/health/retinol-burn

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/how-these... - "For context, consider that a single 3-ounce serving of pan-fried beef liver [alone] contains [over 2x the recommended daily upper limit of Vitamin A]."

Is your point that supplements have side effects? I don't think that's surprising to anyone at all.

My point is that "once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers" is wrong. I could plausibly benefit from Finasteride, I'm not rushing for it even though I think it works. We can also see[1] which says "poor diet is recognized as the leading cause of death and disability in the United States, and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, two thirds of disease worldwide will exist because of a poor lifestyle.11-13 A large body of consistent evidence suggests eating a healthy diet can prevent, delay, or even reverse CVD, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and certain cancers.14-19 The effect of such intake is rapid and profound." - yet people aren't rushing for healthy diets and exercise, are they?

And I think your claim is wrong; a lot of people pop vitamin supplements like candy expecting that they are harmless and would be surprised to find they are capable of causing harm; anecdotally I have read of people saying exactly that, which is enough to disprove "wouldn't be surprising to anyone at all".

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6506974/

> I'm not rushing for it even though I think it works

Because of the side effects, right?

> - yet people aren't rushing for healthy diets and exercise, are they?

Because that implies a lifestyle change. I think the assumption here is that this would be a treatment or a pill.

> And I think your claim is wrong; a lot of people pop vitamin supplements like candy expecting that they are harmless and would be surprised to find they are capable of causing harm;

I don't think that most people will be surprised to hear that taking any pill can have negative effects, though I do think that lots of people may be surprised by the dose at which those effects are seen, but there will always be outliers, of course, who may think that eating an entire carton of gummy vitamins is no big deal. But, I don't think that is really relevant, although I'm not sure what point you're trying to make still.

I think you're trying to say that some people won't rush to take this pill because it may have unintended side effects?

> "although I'm not sure what point you're trying to make still."

I'm countering the claim "even naysayers will want this as soon as it works" with evidence that people don't want things which work - for multiple reasons, viz. known side effects, unknown/long term side effects, your 'implying a lifestyle change', not wanting to be early adopters, for examples we have covered, along with people who don't want to 'play God', don't approve of medical treatments, don't want 200 years of working life (as mentioned in the comments elsewhere on this thread).

> This is the feeling I get everytime I see a comment that it will be only for the rich and powerful.

That's not a "feeling", that are words you put into my mouth, to then call it a "feeling" of yours. And that's the top voted reply. Just lol.

It's about a bazillion times easier to point out disparity than to make this work at all. If it does work, it will start out expensive, and get cheaper. Like everything.

It is a concern, look at the current monoclonal antibody alzheimer's treatment that's insanely expensive.

Generally though it's in the interest of the rich to extend the useful lifespan of their workers, training workers from babies is expensive, so it could be cheaper to keep the current ones going for 200 years.

You're picking one single treatment and saying "look, this is proof of the problem", ignoring that the treatment is extremely new - like, ~2 years of availability (and it was rushed out!). There may be inherent costs to the treatment that are specific and unrelated to whatever is found in other treatments.

> so it could be cheaper to keep the current ones going for 200 years.

This sounds like a form of hell. I'd rather die than work for 200 years, I can already barely stomach working as long as I have to.

Unemployment is record low. You could get practically any job you want right now. Why are you working a job you hate?

The reality is that, for the majority of compounds we've found that provide "anti-aging" benefits, they are affordable by the middle class. Some are more expensive than others, but they're all well within an affordable range.

It's very handy that we can collapse whole threads whenever a longevity topic comes up

It’s in the interest of the rich that everyone else has it too. Even if you’re ultra cynical and model the rich as pure selfishness incarnate with zero altruism (which isn’t true), they’d still want the largest possible set of test subjects to find all the ways it can fail without the learning experience being a purely personal experience.

Knowledge and information are too easy to share, if this puzzle is solved everyone is getting it.

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