Wearable fitness devices could help you with your personal longevity strategy.
NEW YORK — Activity monitors could improve our health and extend our lives — if only we could be motivated to use them. Those are the conclusions of two new studies about the promise and perils of relying on fitness trackers to measure and guide how we move.
The monitors, which are expected to be a popular holiday gift again this year, can generally track our steps, speed, stance (sitting or not), distance, energy expenditure and heart rate. The absolute accuracy of these numbers, however, is somewhat suspect, with past studies finding errors in many of the monitors’ measurements. But the inaccuracies are usually consistent, the studies show, so the trackers can reliably indicate how our movements change from day to day.
The broader problem with activity monitors has been that we have not known whether the information they generate actually relates directly to our health. We have not had proof that what most trackers tell us is healthy actually is.
Fat tissue, immune dysfunction and cellular senescence are closely related. Here we have some commentary from Reason at Fightaging! once of our new Patron sponsors about some recent research liking these factors together.
“Cellular senescence is one of the root causes of aging, and there are at present serious, well-funded efforts underway to produce rejuvenation therapies based on the selective destruction of senescent cells in old tissues. This progress is welcome, but it could have started a long time ago. It has taken many years of advocacy and the shoestring production of technology demonstrations to finally convince the broader community of scientists and funding institutions that the evidence has long merited serious investment in treatments to clear senescent cells”.
#sens #aging
New technology driving down the cost of research and therapies!
New technology arriving that will help drive down the costs of gene therapies.
“The researchers were able to use a closed, semi-automated benchtop system to produce genetically-modified HSCs in just one night and hope that such systems will increase the availability and affordability of cell therapies”.
#sens #aging
Led by Nikolay Kandul, senior postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering in the laboratory of Professor of Biology Bruce Hay, the team developed a technique to remove mutated DNA from mitochondria, the small organelles that produce most of the chemical energy within a cell. A paper describing the research appears in the November 14 issue of Nature Communications. There are hundreds to thousands of mitochondria per cell, each of which carries its own small circular DNA genome, called mtDNA, the products of which are required for energy production. Because mtDNA has limited repair abilities, normal and mutant versions of mtDNA are often found in the same cell, a condition known as heteroplasmy.
Hitting the pause button on development in embryos has implications for understanding aging.
UC San Francisco researchers have found a way to pause the development of early mouse embryos for up to a month in the lab, a finding with potential implications for assisted reproduction, regenerative medicine, aging, and even cancer, the authors say.
The new study—published online November 23, 2016 in Nature —involved experiments with pre-implantation mouse embryos, called blastocysts. The researchers found that drugs that inhibit the activity a master regulator of cell growth called mTOR can put these early embryos into a stable and reversible state of suspended animation.
“Normally, blastocysts only last a day or two, max, in the lab. But blastocysts treated with mTOR inhibitors could survive up to 4 weeks,” said the study’s lead author, Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Miguel Ramalho-Santos, PhD, who is an associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.
Progress towards making a blood scrubber to calibrate the pro aging factors in blood. Irina Conboy has spent the last 20 years working on parabiosis and signalling factors in blood and this is yet another step forward for their research.
Whilst many are seeking the secret sauce in young blood the data suggests it is much more likely the case that old blood contains too many pro-aging factors eg, TGF-beta, TNF-a, IL-6, CD38 etc… The aim is now to filter old blood and calibrate such factors in order to promote a pro-youthful signalling environment. If only this device was small enough to wear or implant.
In what could be a fresh chapter in the never-ending story of the search for eternal youth, scientists are to tinker with people’s blood in the hope of slowing down the ageing process and preventing age-related diseases.
Researchers in California plan to launch a clinical trial of the radical – and highly experimental – approach in the next six months, after a small study in mice found the treatment had promise.
Posted in life extension
29th November in Berlin there is a meetup for LE enthusiasts.
Announcing our year-end meetup in Berlin.
Join our casual get together of like-minded people. We chat about extending our healthy lifespans and the latest developments in this exciting field.
Again, a lot has happened since our last meetup, great science news and our decision to build a dedicated team for project “Personal Longevity Strategy (see also forever-healthy.org/careers)
This is most likely going to be the last one for this year.
Destroying and replacing the immune system is one of the approaches to treat the aging process.
Fightaging! provides some commentary about the immune system in relation to aging. Addressing the decline of the immune system is one of the approaches SRF is interested in and is a cornerstone of rejuvenation biotechnology.
“Understanding exactly how aging progressively harms the intricate choreography of the immune response is a massive project, and nowhere near completion. It is possible to judge how far along researchers are in this work by the side effect of the quality of therapies for autoimmune disease, which are malfunctions in immune configuration, and largely incurable at the present time. From a practical point of view, and as mentioned above, the best prospects for effective treatments in the near future involve destroying and recreating the immune system. That works around our comparative ignorance by removing all of the problems that researchers don’t understand in addition to ones that they do.”
#sens #aging
This gives a very simple summary of the process of drug development.
The development process from Pre-Clinical testing to an approved product we can use is a long one. A global average of 17 years with the US being 12 years is the historical norm for new drugs and therapies to be developed.
