Scientists say they've reversed brain aging in mice with a nasal spray | Hacker News Reader

Scientists say they've reversed brain aging in mice with a nasal spray

sciencedaily.com

68 pointsbookmtn28 comments

> Behavioral testing showed that treated models performed significantly better on memory and recognition tasks.

"Treated models" - it sounds like they're trying really hard to hide the fact that this was all in mice. From the paper:

> Therefore, using a mouse model, this study investigated whether IN administration of hiPSC-NSC-EVs in late middle age can significantly reduce oxidative stress and curb microglia-mediated neuroinflammaging in the hippocampus.

Cool! But please be honest in your press releases.

ctrl+f'd for 'mice', no results. I can think of no other word than deceit.

It’s very probably not deceit, it’s just biomedical research jargon from the original paper that was written for a scientist audience that didn’t get translated to a lay audience language for a sciencedaily/press release format.

Ok, I've inmiced the title above. Thanks for catching this.

Love the verbification!

“While additional research is still needed before the treatment could be tested in humans, the study offers a striking possibility.”

(In mice)

Pinky and the brain can now sleep soundly as they age like wine

We are going to end up with immortal mice.

Always pack your towel for space travel!

Actually the fact that we don’t have immortal mice is what makes me feel like this current optimism with respect to life extension is pretty unrealistic.

edit: admin dang has fixed the title

I always interpret the rule [0] "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." as applying to stories like this one.

Adding the words [in mice] would not only be the acceptable exception the rule is referring to, but probably necessary. This would align the title properly with the article contents and avoid giving people false expectations about human results.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Excellent news if you're a mouse.

Algernon for Flowers.

I'm afraid of the result if we take someone wrapped in a comforting haze of dementia (I'm getting there) and force them into cold harsh reality. It may be as welcome a sobriety to an alcoholic. If the insurance stops paying does it become Flowers for Algernon?

We have several drugs that emulate dementia in various ways and call them recreational.

Presumably this drug (like all the others) is dirt-cheap to synthesize and the only reason anything is expensive is a government granted monopoly that’s nominally encouraging innovation

I don't grant the assumption that innovation is helped with the current US system. It is entirely possible that it is actually hurt considerably compared to other systems. There is a massive incentive to prolong health problems if you make money on treating them. Even without people being evil, when the major learning signal (money) points constantly towards 'prolong the problem' it isn't hard to imagine that the system that evolves from it is actively worse than nearly any other system with a good loss function like 'health' or even just 'fame and notoriety for the scientists involved'

China is making huge investments in biotech, and its regulators tend to be more permissive than those in many Western countries. It would not surprise me if sooner or later, China begins to take the lead in medical innovation and the US is reduced to playing catch-up.

Of course, more permissive regulation means increased safety risks for consumers and clinical trial participants-but if you don’t live in China, that’s a price you won’t personally pay.

I want to agree with you but have other systems provided better drugs / research than the US? Afaik SOTA in anything medical is basically US researched but .. I haven't actually looked into it that much.

Hmmm. "Comforting haze" seems dubious. My grandmother had Alzheimer's and at least from the outside it seemed like a bad LSD trip that never ended. She didn't understand what was happening and was scared.

Sample size of one and anecdotal of course, but...

The source paper:

https://isevjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jev...

Addition of a source-paper link to complex science studies like this should be encouraged (if not mandatory) at the top of posts like this.

Real-world reports can be valuable to some readers who are non-plussed by journalistic interpretations.I don't see deception going on in this one; it's clear about its limits.

Was looking for the “in mice” in this article and found none… anybody got a link to the paper please

2.2 Animals and Study Design The study comprised two cohorts of C57BL/6 mice: young adult (3 months old) and late middle-aged (18 months old). We chose 18 months old mice, as this mouse age is approximately equivalent to a 60-year-old human (Dutta and Sengupta 2016).

I posted paper above, DOI was linked at the end.

Intranasal Human NSC-Derived EVs Therapy Can Restrain Inflammatory Microglial Transcriptome, and NLRP3 and cGAS-STING Signalling, in Aged Hippocampus

https://isevjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jev...

This headline is keeping me young because I keep reading it every five years or so.

These billionaire mice are funding this research; humans should do the same

So you are telling me that the mice from Hitchhikers guide are real?

“These creatures you call mice you see are not quite as they appear, they are merely the protrusions into our dimension of vast, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings.”

—Slartibartfast

Imagine the political implications of this if it actually worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com