Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

nature.com

182 pointsaatish63 comments

I am stupefied by this.

Many, many times I have considered:

"what would happen if I banked my own blood and transfused it back to myself 40 years later"

And of course, my next thought was "of course that has been thought of, and tried, and the reason we don't all know about it is because it must not be helpful."

But you're telling me that, in fact, nobody thought to try this ? It is 2014/2015 when someone got around to trying this out ?

Well, Lance Armstrong thought of it. Worked or him pretty well. Sort of.

blood doping has been a cycling past time since the 70's. Lance's novel approach was the medical write-off on drugs which were OK'd due to their use in his then ongoing cancer treatments.

Listen, people are like...craaazy busy...

Is there a method to store blood and have it still be viable for transfusion after that long? I know refrigerated blood only lasts a few weeks...

Is that true ?

Whatever controlled freezing method they propose for cryogenics ... although they also propose draining all the blood out first, so ... perhaps that's not relevant ?

Transfusions seem unlikely to work at this point based on evidence to date, probably because the factors involved are very short-lived. E.g. transfusions failed to move the needle in mice:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4215333/

There is a human trial for transfusion of young blood to Alzheimer's patients but this is probably not going to tell us much, because it is so specific, and because the mouse transfusions didn't work.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329831.400-young-blo...

It could also be a feedback process - components in older blood induce responses in younger organ tissue that releases components into younger blood that is then transferred to the older organism

Well the Alzheimer's study is still useful in its own right.

I think they did the experiment in the 50's with mice, but they didn't understood transplantation and rejection so well back then, so many mice had serious problems.Now we can prevent those.

Also i think you'd have a hard time to get money for any "anti aging" research up until recently.

I'd just like to say: Simpsons did it first.

July 11, 1991, episode "Blood Feud", the last episode of season 2. The scene is around the 7 minute mark. The implication is that the blood transfusion has made him feel young again.

There's actually a few references like this throughout the seasons of the simpsons.

It's honestly weird to me this wasn't tried in the early days of performing blood transfusions. I mean honestly the study wouldn't even be ethically questionable. You find patients that need routine blood transfusions and track their health over a period of time, you then administer blood transfusions from sources where you can control for the age of the blood donor.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was never even thought of because people seem all too willing to think of the body as "just a machine".

Given that we literally urinate out neurotransmitters, and that young people tend to be happier (it's actually called the happiness U-bend, in that 18-21 year olds are as happy as 70 year olds, and 50 years old is the lowest point in peoples reported happiness) so we could just be shooting people full of--quite literally--happiness. Given that severe depression can lead to myocardial infraction, I don't doubt general depression also has long term health effects. Also I don't think antidepressants would benefit, just because they generally make people "not feel" rather than "happy".

"It's honestly weird to me this wasn't tried in the early days of performing blood transfusions."

It's weird to me it wasn't tried the day after the first successful blood transfusion. A child would think of it.

That's what's so stupefying...

If memory serves me it was tried, many times soon after blood transfusions become known to the public. Many rich in europe claimed the blood transfusions from the young rejuvenated them in many respects.

I do not remember where I read this any more 10+ years ago now.

Here is a small snippet I found with a few minutes of search that seems to be reference to the same behavior I remember reading about: https://books.google.com/books?id=bdIBlQXSKi8C&pg=PA78&dq=hi...

No, Simpsons wasn't first. See the movie "Being there" with Peter Sellers - the wealthy but aged and ill king-maker in this imagined U.S. gets regular blood infusions of 'young blood'.

goes back further than that! [1]

[1] : How to live forever: lessons of history http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119261/

There was also the classic "All in the Family" when Archie Bunker learns he's received blood from a black donor.

Vampires did it first.

The HIV, Hep B and Hep C infections probably wouldn't improve one's life span much.

In the early days blood was in short supply and safety wasn't guaranteed. So logically, it was only used in patients that really needed it. Transfusions are safer today (there may be viruses we don't know about...) but blood is still in short supply and there are still rare but life threatening transfusion reactions.

It is 2014/2015 when someone got around to trying this out ?

Sure you are "stupefied" if you don't read the article:

Clive McCay, a biochemist and gerontologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was the first to apply parabiosis to the study of ageing. In 1956 ...

I'm not sure about the veracity of this story, but aparently pope Innocent VIII tried boold tranfussion from young boys to kkep him young in 1492. The pope and donor died in the process, probably by incompatibility.

There was a study done a couple of years back that showed that stored blood started to become less effective after about 21 days.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/the-shelf-life-of-d...

This reminds me of a PostSecret submission from several months ago:

https://postsecretdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/blood.j...

You can tell it's from a real biologist by the time they spent aligning each line of text to the background image.

Carl Zimmer published a piece on this in the NYTimes almost a year ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-ho...).

Here's the HN thread on that topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695621

So Elizabeth Bathory was correct after all--ha! Take that, naysayers.

Bathing, drinking: not-so-much. Apparently it requires direct circulatory installation (but of which sub-component??). Unfortunately for the "Blood Countess", she was limited by the technology of her times.

I'm really curious how symbolic the old 'youth blood' myth were. As if they had some slight proof that it could work but did it in a cargo cult way.

I'm not ashamed to say that was my first thought when I saw the article.

As if I need another reason to kill babies. Perhaps there is some truth to gaining life energy by eating your opponents heart.

You need to pick more challenging opponents, then!

What a great plot for a sci-fi/noir novel; an evil old man captures babies and infuses their blood into himself.

With a variant: the babies don't just vanish, they disappear for a while, and then come back. But alas, inexplicably, once they're back they begin to age very fast.

Maybe they don't disappear at all, they just start to age and that's how the inquiry starts. People notice the disease and think it's some kind of virus; but a young journalist trying to connect the dots notices all affected babies stayed at the same clinic at some point.

He goes there to see for himself and is greeted by a brilliant doctor who's wise beyond his years...

If the secret to immortality is baby blood, that's one of those hilariously cliche coincidences that makes me think we're living in a poorly written universe.

The inevitable "baby factory" scene in the movie is sure going to have some punch

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

We could call it...Dracula!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory

Heck, any Heinlein fan could've told you this would work. In the "Future History" series (specifically, Methuselah's Children ), we learn that the first effective rejuvenation technique was to transfuse in younger blood. It didn't become practical, however, until they developed a way of growing new blood in vitro. I imagine that's the next thing scientists will be working on...if successful, we'll get rejuvenation quite a bit earlier than Heinlein's timeline predicted it.

It's likely even simpler than that. At this point it's a matter of brute force to investigate the different factors in young vs old blood, isolate the ones that have the rejuvenating effects, and synthesize away, likely via programming bacteria to produce them.

They have already identified one candidate--GDF11--and there will likely be others. So it may be a matter of injecting yourself with a mix of appropriate synthetics every day or two.

What benefits does parabiosis have over taking HGH? The effects of parabiosis in mice sounds almost exactly like the effects of growth hormone

That's what I was wondering... is it just the increased growth hormone levels in the young blood or is it the blood cells themselves?

If I'm reading the article right, it was neither, but actually just the plasma:

> Plasma alone had the same effects. “We didn't have to exchange the whole blood”

Did they remove the growth hormones from the plasma? It doesn't say...

From some cursory wiki reading it seems blood plasma is quite the blanket term. Electrolytes, proteins, CO2 removal, it's involved in quite a number of places.

You don't need a transfusion to do this. You just need to work on your blood health.

Excerpt:

“I thought, 'Hey wait, they're sharing blood,'” says Michael. “'This could answer that question we've been asking for years.'” At the end of the presentation, he ran up to Irina and Rando. He had not even finished his pitch before Rando said: “Let's do it.”

It was when I read up on how the body reacts to high altitude that I had my aha! moment that the blood was the common denominator between the gut and lung issues in people with CF. When you go up in altitude, you pee more. Well before you see altitude sickness, the body starts dumping wastes via the kidneys that it can't breathe out due to thin air.

Am I the only one wondering what happens to the poor young mouse when it gets the old blood?

Starts talking about the good old days, complains about the noise teenager mice call music these days, nods off for a while then heads over to Luby's for an early dinner.

The leaders of the Chinese communist party have already found this long time ago. As I known the old leaders of the chinese communist party change their blood of PLA periodical to keep them health. one article could find here: http://app.secretchina.com/node/472395 (in Chinese)

It looks like hieroglyphs to me.

Here's google's translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http:....

Surprisingly readable after you get few paragraphs in and start picking up on the common mistranslated words (Some other title for Mao is being translated as "hair").

Mao means hair. That is his name.

Interesting, it's able to infer that Mao is a name about half the time.

(I still consider it a mistranslation, as it's a name. I wouldn't expect John Smith to translate to another language with "Smith" being replaced bu the equivalent in the other language either).

But in English we capitalize names and put articles before common nouns, whereas in Chinese both are just "mao." It is a mistranslation, but a more understandable one than translating "John Smith" as "John a metal-worker".

To state the obvious :

Aging billionaire keeps a dozen healthy athletic vegetarian teenagers on hand for weekly blood transfusions.

No joke. It's happening right now.

So is this a bad thing?

Didn't Heinlein predict this in the 70s?

In which novel?

Dracula?

Thank God i have the sister younger than me that love me very much :D

Mr. Burns was right.

Elizabeth Bathory was right first — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Báthory

Exactly what I was thinking.

The future of Silicon Valley: "This internship really sucks. Just when I think there's nothing left they can ask of me..."

Ugh, the comments for this article are a disaster. I was trying to start a conversation in a creative way, my apologies.

Plot twist: it's all a corporate hoax by the makers of the Hansel and Gretel movie.

The secret of Dick Cheney, the Dark Lord, Himself, has been revealed! For decades, He has been kept alive by the blood of the young, and, until now, only His doctors knew the truth. Expect His vengence to be swift and severe!

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