Little Exercise, Big Effects: Reversing Aging

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/32/11578.short?rss=1

by jamesbritt • 15 years ago

158 45 15 years ago

jamiegull• 15 years ago

The 0.7km/week for a house mouse translates to about 7.5 miles/week for a 5'8" tall man compared to a 10cm long mouse. Lots of assumptions, but 7.5 miles is way more than the average sedentary person jogs in a week. It's also very easy to reach for a recreational jogger. Lots of assumptions in there.

brfox• 15 years ago

And animal models of disease (or aging) are much simpler than real life human biology. One big reason being that lab strains of mice (and maybe the rats in this study, too) are inbred and very homogeneous - genetically speaking. So, something which has a big effect in a lab animal might be due to some strange combination of genes that most "outbred" species (like humans) don't ever have.

ristretto2• 15 years ago

The HN title gives the impression that they reversed aging. They only reversed changes in memory performance in old mice that are infected with E.coli.

It would be interesting to know how they assessed memory performance - are they using spatial memory tests?

amirmc2• 15 years ago

Good question. Appears that they use contextual fear conditioning to assess memory.

From the research article: "We chose to use the immediate-shock fear conditioning paradigm (Fanselow, 1990; Rudy et al., 2002) as the learning task. Here, foot shock is delivered very quickly upon exposure to the experimental context on the fear conditioning day. However, the rats are preexposed to the context at an earlier time. The preexposures are required so that the subjects are able to form a 'conjunctive representation' of the context, so that it can be associated with the shock on the conditioning day (Rudy et al., 2002). We chose this fear conditioning paradigm because it is highly and specifically dependent on the hippocampus (Rudy et al., 2002), and we have already shown that E. coli interferes with memory of this task in aging rats (Barrientos et al., 2006)"

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

The HN title gives the impression that they reversed aging.

The initial title was too long for HN, so I truncated it. I apologize if it ended up misleading.

Alex39176• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, cannabis also prevents neuroinflammation, even in extremely low doses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uVXs6CY2ps

http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/clinical.pdf

The endocannabinoid system seems to be the main mechanism our bodies use to naturally regulate inflammation. My understanding is that there is a growing belief among cannabinoid researchers that our cannabinoid receptors can get blocked as we get older, and so there may be a need to either supplement with phytocannabinoids and/or employ various techniques to unmethylate our CB1 receptors. There are a number of folks doing pre-clinical research on cannabinoids as potential treatments for alzheimers and other inflammatory / autoimmune diseases using various cannabinoids.

Here is a cool paper about how colorectal cancer seems to result from the CB1 receptors being knocked out:

http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/turned-off-cannabinoid-...

It's possible that most cancers result from the same mechanism, although we don't really know yet. What we do know is that regular marijuana users have a 62% lower chance of head and neck cancers, and that there are an enormous amount of studies showing that cannabinoids can promote both apoptosis (cell death) in cancer cells and are anti-angiogenic, meaning they cut off the blood flow to the tumors.

d2• 15 years ago

The problem is that I feel less smart and less motivated for 2 weeks after smoking a joint.

grandalf• 15 years ago

wrong strain?

Alex39176• 15 years ago

Then don't smoke a joint. The standard sized joints that NIDA hands out for research are 0.7 grams. The amount needed to get this anti-inflammatory effect is roughly .02 grams, in other words 1 / 35th of a joint. There are also two different ways that you can get the same health benefits without any psychoactive side effects. First, you can get high-CBD weed. CBD is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid that basically cancels out the effects of THC. Second, if you juice raw cannabis it is basically non-psychoactive, because without heating or drying it the THCA never gets decarboxylated into THC. Here are a couple articles about this:

http://cannabisinternational.org/info/hightimes.pdf

http://cannabisinternational.org/info/treatingyourself.pdf

ristretto2• 15 years ago

You are starting too early - you have to wait until you're old first.

danielharan• 15 years ago

Cannabis as a treatment for Alzheimer's would be rather ironic, given its current reputation.

Alex39176• 15 years ago

Actually the cool thing about it is that not only does it prevent neuroinflammation, but it also promotes neurogenesis. There was a recent study that tracked IQs before and after using cannabis, and what they found was that those who took up smoking cannabis actually gained almost six IQ points. (For less than 3.5 grams per week.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#M...

evgen• 15 years ago

As there is a rather large cohort of regular and past cannabis smokers entering into prime Alzheimer years we are going to see if this is true within the decade and do not even need to fund a study. If the Alzheimer rate starts to drop then this is worth further research, but if not I will begin to suspect some people are blowing some rather fragrant smoke on this issue...

Cushman3• 15 years ago

If it's a receptor thing, it wouldn't only apply to phytocannibanoids, right? I'm given to understand there are a number of synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists with much higher affinity and/or selectivity than the phytocannabinoids. Are you aware of any research into the potential differences?

I suppose it wouldn't make much difference, since as you say it only takes a tiny amount of cannabis despite THC being only a partial agonist.

Alex39176• 15 years ago

"Are you aware of any research into the potential differences?"

Not off the top of my head, but here are some links to 'databases' of hundreds or thousands of research articles on cannabinoids:

http://www.letfreedomgrow.com/cmu/GrannysList-Jan2011.pdf

http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php

http://www.cannabis-med.org/index.php?lng=en

In general though I think cannabis is a good example of why plant-based medicine is often more safe and effective than using synthetics. That is, when one molecule in a plant acts as a poison, then generally there will be some other molecule in the plant to counteract that poison. That's exactly what we see here, with the anti-psychotic effects of the CBD balancing out the psychotomimetic effects of the THC. And most patients seem to find the plant-based medicine to be both more tolerable and also more effective. Obviously there are many many cases where plant-based medicine is an inferior choice, as with aspirin, but in this case it seems to be winning at least so far.

Also, there is some suggestion that with plant-based medicine the body actually has the ability to pick and choose which compounds to use depending on what it's current needs are:

"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.

For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse? However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.

This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...

kragen2• 15 years ago

> cannabinoids ... are anti-angiogenic, meaning they cut off the blood flow to the tumors.

Hmm, like thalidomide? They must not be very anti-angiogenic, or heavy pot smokers would give birth to babies missing limbs.

bfe• 15 years ago

The natural ligand for cannabinoid receptors, anandamide, is stimulated by exercise, particularly distance running. "Runner's High" is just that.

freesciencenow2• 15 years ago

Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

Here's the full paper: http://209.20.67.195/misc/littleexercise.pdf

(See profile for why I do what I do.)

amirmc2• 15 years ago

Your profile does not really explain why you do what you do (it basically repeats what you've said here). Care to expand?

freesciencenow2• 15 years ago

As my profile says, "I do this both to help the discussion and as an act of civil disobedience."

Was there something more you wanted to know?

asifjamil3• 15 years ago

Interesting article.

I remember reading somewhere the opposite hypothesis. The argument went like this:

more exercise --> faster metabolism --> faster consumption of your body utilities --> lower life expectancy

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Well, the study is called "[A] Little Exercise, Big Effects", not "More Exercise, More Results."

asifjamil3• 15 years ago

not sure what you mean. i was pointing out an opposite effect.

AngryParsley• 15 years ago

Exercise does cause damage to your body, both structural and oxidative. Fortunately, that damage triggers repair mechanisms which make you stronger than before. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Physical_exercise

An aside: Reading this article made me wonder why I tasted blood after particularly hard workouts. Apparently the heart can pump with enough pressure to rupture some of the capillaries in your lungs. A tiny amount of blood leaks out and gets aerosolized. At least, so says this paper: http://abughrai.be/Vulnerability%20of%20pulmonary%20capillar...

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Seriously, how can one not already realize this? You can of course work yourself to death, but you'd think people would have noticed how much healthier they feel when they have been exercising, and how quickly they deteriorate when they haven't.

m0nastic• 15 years ago

My girlfriend just told me about a study that also seemed to show that exercise can be useful in treatment of schizophrenia (by promoting hippocampal development).

This appears to be the study (she read it in Psychology Today, which didn't reference it by name):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20124113

jonnathanson• 15 years ago

As an additional benefit to exercise: cardiovascular health is closely correlated with mental health and performance, due to the maintenance (or improvement) of blood flow to the brain.

ed2417• 15 years ago

In rats.

bennesvig• 15 years ago

This is what Art De Vany and the New Evolution Diet preaches. Short, high intensity exercise.

Little Exercise, Big Effects: Reversing Aging

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