Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

http://www.nature.com/news/ageing-research-blood-to-blood-1.16762

by aatish • 12 years ago

182 62 12 years ago

zxcvcxz• 12 years ago

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

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

You need to pick more challenging opponents, then!

bambax• 12 years ago

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...

saalweachter• 12 years ago

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.

ianremsen• 12 years ago

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

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

We could call it...Dracula!

digi_owl2• 12 years ago

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

moonshinefe• 12 years ago

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

theophrastus• 12 years ago

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.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

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.

FrankenPC• 12 years ago

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

ikeboy• 12 years ago

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

PublicEnemy111• 12 years ago

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

nostromo• 12 years ago

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...

digi_owl2• 12 years ago

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.

jzila• 12 years ago

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

rsync3• 12 years ago

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 ?

spitfire• 12 years ago

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

serf2• 12 years ago

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.

Mangalor• 12 years ago

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

dangrossman• 12 years ago

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...

rsync3• 12 years ago

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 ?

reasonattlm• 12 years ago

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...

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

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

CameronNemo• 12 years ago

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

minthd• 12 years ago

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.

electromagnetic• 12 years ago

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".

rsync3• 12 years ago

"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...

wallaceowen21• 12 years ago

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'.

Gatsky• 12 years ago

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.

spyder• 12 years ago

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 ...

mvaliente2001• 12 years ago

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.

halviti• 11 years ago

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...

Tarrosion• 12 years ago

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

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

tannerc• 12 years ago

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

erbo• 12 years ago

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.

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

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.

zach2• 12 years ago

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

zach2• 11 years ago

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

pinder• 12 years ago

Mr. Burns was right.

Eric_WVGG• 12 years ago

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

mattmurdog• 12 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking.

gcdgcd• 12 years ago

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)

EGreg• 12 years ago

It looks like hieroglyphs to me.

kbenson2• 12 years ago

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").

rrodriguez89• 12 years ago

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

sizzzzlerz• 12 years ago

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!

Mz• 12 years ago

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.

JoachimS• 12 years ago

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

kevbin• 12 years ago

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.

psadri• 12 years ago

Dracula?

adekok• 12 years ago

Didn't Heinlein predict this in the 70s?

chckn• 11 years ago

In which novel?

swayvil• 11 years ago

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?

Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

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