A new study in both mice and humans has found that biological age is dynamic, and that some increases in biological age caused by stress can be reversed with recovery. The research is published in Cell Metab olism.
How can we measure age?
Our biological age is not completely linked to our chronological age. While chronological age is a measure of the amount of time you have been alive, biological age indicates how much aging has occurred to your cells over your lifetime.
Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists have created a promising injectable cell therapy to treat osteoarthritis that both reduces inflammation and also regenerates articular cartilage.
Recently identified by the Food and Drug Administration as a public health crisis, osteoarthritis affects more than 520 million people worldwide who deal with pain and inflammation. Osteoarthritis is typically induced by mechanical or traumatic stress in the joint, leading to damaged cartilage that cannot be repaired naturally.
“Without better understanding of what drives the initiation and progression of osteoarthritis, effective treatment has been limited,” said lead author Johanna Bolander of WFIRM. “Initially, we studied what goes wrong in osteoarthritic joints, compared these processes to functional environments, and used this information to develop an immunotherapy cell treatment.”
Calorie restriction, a proven intervention to slow aging in animals, showed evidence of slowing the pace of biological aging in a human randomized trial.
In a first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial, an international team of researchers led by the Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University.
Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.
Summary: Listening to or practicing music had positive implications on cognitive decline in older adults by stimulating the production of gray matter in key brain areas, a new study reveals.
Source: University of Geneva.
Normal aging is associated with progressive cognitive decline. But can we train our brain to delay this process?
Researchers at UC Davis are the first to report how a specific type of brain cells, known as oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, transfer cell material to neurons in the mouse brain. Their work provides evidence of a coordinated nuclear interaction between these cells and neurons. The study was published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
“This novel concept of material transfer to neurons opens new possibilities for understanding brain maturation and finding treatments for neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” said corresponding author Olga Chechneva is an assistant project scientist at UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and independent principal investigator in the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine at Shriners Children’s Northern California.
Oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, also called oligodendroglia, are a type of glial cells found in the central nervous system. From birth onward, these glial cells arise to support neural circuit maturation. They are mostly known for their role in myelination—the formation of the insulating myelin sheath around nerve axons.
Senescent cells are those that have stopped dividing but haven’t read the “time to die” memo. Instead, they hang around, accumulating in the body and fueling chronic inflammation – sometimes called inflammaging – which in turn, contributes to conditions such cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, sarcopenia and degenerative disorders.
Longevity. Technology: In mice, eliminating senescent cells from aging tissues can restore tissue balance and lead to an increased healthy lifespan. Now a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of Mass General Brigham (MGB), has found that the immune response to a virus that is ubiquitously present in human tissues can detect and eliminate senescent cells in the skin [1].
For the study, which is published in Cell, the scientists analyzed young and old human skin samples to learn more about the clearance of senescent cells in human tissue.
What did scientists think about aging in 1931? That’s right. 1931. because that is the year the first biological textbook was published “The Science of Life”. I managed to get my hands on the first edition of this textbook. This was my face when i first received it. As you can see i was quite excited. And this textbook is made up of separate books. I bought book i last year and i read it. Having enjoyed it and discovered that it was part of this massive ensemble piece — well, i’ve read the first “book” — there are, if my roman numerals are correct, 9 books in total. And in this first book, penned “The Living Body”, the authors, most famously, H.G.Wells, Sir Julian Huxley and G.P.Wells, H.G’s son discusses the body as a machine and that.
“For the present it is enough to remember that all animals (including men) are combustion engines of an intricate and curious kind, which live by oxidising their food”
I bought first The Living Body and then discovered it was part of this massive ensemble piece and decided i needed to read it. Now, besides being surprised to find out that H.G.Wells wrote not just non-fiction, but biology non-fiction, i was also surprised to hear how both similar & dissimilar their views were back in 1931 compared to today and i wasnt sure if that was good or terrifying.
So, how did they think of human aging. Well, in the last chapter of this 1st book titled “The wearing out of the machine and its reproduction”, they discuss it.
Pushing The Boundaries Of Research To Build A Synthetic Kidney — Dr. Andrew McMahon, Ph.D. & Lewis Kleinberg, University Kidney Research Organization (UKRO)
The University Kidney Research Organization (UKRO — https://ukrocharity.org/) is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit charity, co-founded prominent entertainment attorney Kenneth Kleinberg, inspired by his personal journey with kidney disease, focused on supporting medical research and education related to the causes, treatment, and eradication of all forms of kidney disease.
Dr. Andrew McMahon, Ph.D. (https://keck.usc.edu/faculty-search/andrew-p-mcmahon/) is Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, Provost Professor and the inaugural holder of the W. M. Keck Professorship of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, and is responsible for overseeing UKRO’s Synthetic Kidney Project. In addition, Dr. McMahon chairs the recently created Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School. He also holds an appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.