SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Taking a young person's plasma and infusing it into an older person to ward off aging -- a therapy that's fascinated some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley -- has no proven clinical benefit, the Food and Drug Administration said.
The agency issued a safety alert on Tuesday about the infusion of plasma from young donors for the prevention of conditions such as aging or memory loss, or for the treatment of such conditions as dementia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease or post‐traumatic stress disorder.
"There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product," the FDA said in a statement from Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, head of the agency's biologics center.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @03:40PM (18 children)
My eighty-year-old grandfather had this done (in Germany) and was very pleased with the results.
Note the weasel-wording in TFS: "no proven critical benefit" [yet]. Because the long, expensive FDA-approved trials are still in progress. Which trials were initiated because previous trials showed results. Results good enough to merit more expensive trials.
Fuck the FDA.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 20 2019, @03:54PM
My buddy's cousin's father says it works great.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:06PM (2 children)
I remember there used to be quacks in Germany injecting cells harvested from lambs into rich people, so that the "young cells" of the lamb would fix the "old cells" in their body. Here's a German Wikipedia link: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frischzellentherapie [wikipedia.org]
Lunacy. But a fool and their money are soon parted.
(Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
Ah! But what about "Goat Gland Science" [wikipedia.org]? Nothing like transplanting some goat testicles into your own to make you live forever! Of course, may develop a chin beard, devilish pupils, and an urge to eat almost anything.
The word for all this is Symapthetic Magic [wikipedia.org], like putting a knife under the mattress of childbirth, to, you know, "cut" the pain.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:45PM
Thanks! Now I know how to describe Homeopathy in one phrase.
Because "like cures like". Don't ask me how, it just does, OK?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:09PM (11 children)
On what basis would this even work? Blood is pretty simple, the body completely replaces it multiple times a year, which means that any potential benefit from this would be extremely short lived.
Apart from cases like carbon monoxide poisoning, there's not any reason to think that replacing blood is going to have any sort of measurable impact.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:19PM (5 children)
Cells in the body have go though 50-70 billion cell divisions a day, and red blood cells survive around four months. So for a person who is 80 their cells have had a much longer time to get corrupted, where as the young person has cells that are less likely to be corrupted. I don't know if the red blood cells made by an 80 year old are less efficient, but if they are there might be possible gain? Please correct me on this.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)
And the cells that divide the most are the sperm line .... 1500 per second. Few million per day. And yet, somehow the new baby created with all these divisions ends up "perfect" again? I sense the theory of accumulated damage is kind of crap. It's more about evolution of our species than the division crap. You can see that in nature with short lived animals that get tumours at young age. For humans, it's rather rare to have cancer before about age 50-60.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43308729 [bbc.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1942631 [nih.gov]
Efficiency comes down to whether you use it or not. In RBC, as you can probably see from the link (even in Japanese), RBC went slightly down but only in men. But all other parameters related to it remained the same. I would not be surprised if RBC for people that do exercise, also doesn't go down. You use it, or you lose it... that's the saying?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:21PM
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/10/older-fathers-associated-with-increased-birth-risks.html [stanford.edu]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:09PM (2 children)
Blood cells don't come from blood cells, they are made in bone marrow: "The cells develop in the bone marrow and circulate for about 100–120 days in the body" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell [wikipedia.org] So transfusing blood gets you red blood cells made from younger bone marrow that will die and need to be replaced again shortly. To do it right, get a skeleton transplant. (Or as the industry may prefer, get your "Frequent transfusioner" discount card and go back 4 times a year for the price of 3!)
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday February 20 2019, @08:12PM (1 child)
Again, correct me where I am wrong.
Did a quick browsing of wiki on bone marrow transplants.
If I am understanding correctly, the purpose of the bone marrow transplants is to replace bad/improper Hematopoietic stem cells with donor cells that are presumed to be better. This causes new blood production to be based off of better cells. So, if it were not so dangerous, would bone marrow transplants where the donors are younger, provide better functioning blood cells? If cell division does not lead to breakdown in quality of blood cells over time, there should be no improvement, but if there is a fall in quality over time it could be a way to kick-start the system (if the procedure can be made less dangerous).
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @09:33AM
No.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:45PM
Oxygen levels would rise most likely. For old people and those on blood thinners to control pressure there issues with oxygen delivery that makes them sleepy and if they're low enough, too fat and/or old enough they can even see dementia and alzheimer-like symptoms. This is usually where CPAP masks and even oxygen tanks come into play.
On there other end of the spectrum young endurance athletes deliberately sleep in high altitude chambers to condition their bodies to oxygen deprivation and then switch to high-oxygen high-pressure chambers shortly before a competition to mimic the effects of the now banned Erythropoietin. Another less safe approach was to deposit and store blood packs that were then "condensed" as much as 2:1 blood cells and then replace as much of your blood with the packs at the day of the competition.
Not sure how much any of this is allowed or not in the competitions. And I have no idea about the medical implication long term or the risks for complications. But it's almost certainly has beneficial short-term gains.
Disclosure: I'm neither a doctor nor do I play one on TV...
compiling...
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:50PM
"Blood is pretty simple"
No. There's little "simple" about blood.
Aside from the many types of cells contained in it, there are scads of proteins in it ranging from antibodies to signaling molecules as well as the structural ones that give it its consistency. Even with our best instrumentation and lab techniques (which are light years beyond what we had we had in the 90s) teasing out just which parts are doing this is tough. It's little better than either trying blood fractions and seeing if they help (with all the time needed to see if it has any effect before you can get evidence yeah or nay) or guessing and trying a particular component of millions of them with the same time lag and number of animal subjects and hoping you'll get lucky.
It's fairly well established that this works in animals at least to some extent. That said, a mouse is not a person and trials are ongoing.
If we can figure out what signaling systems are involved we can then use things like combinatorial chemistry to see what might bind to them (but there are boatloads of bottlenecks there, starting with the hope that something in our screening libraries will do so). It's a hard problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:27PM
On the basis if Venture Vampire Capitalists, the Paypal Mafia, Thanophobics; why are there no names named in the Fine Summory? Peter? Where's Peter? We would want to know if one of Trump's very smart Tech advisors were caught up in pseudo-science like this, wouldn't we?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday February 20 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)
The not-entirely-unsupported theory is that there is a blood-borne chemical signaling mechanism that controls the activity of your body's self repair mechanism. In the very young, this mechanism is extremely active making kids extremely resilient to injury. As a function of age this signal diminishes, and the self repair mechanism falls behind. This leaves the cellular equivalent of broken windows and abandoned buildings lying around (senescent tissue) that causes systemic problems (inflammation) and is a key mechanism of aging.
The root experiment behind this was a mouse trial where they interconnected the circulatory system of an old mouse and a young mouse and after a period of time the old mouse's health improved significantly over control. The cause for it is not known.
The only other comparable anti-aging treatment is extreme caloric restriction, i.e. prolonged fasting. If this triggers the same mechanism or is a different effect is not known.
To me the next logical step in this research would be to determine if the effect is reproducible in mice with plasma or whole blood and fractionate the blood components by molecular weight to help narrow down which, if any, blood component carries the youth factor. Blood isn't simple at all so it could take years to narrow it down to a specific molecule.
Anti-aging/age-reversal research is exciting right now. Last month a small (n30) trial was published that showed non-trivial declines in senscent cell population and effects from the drug combo of dasatinib (chemotherapy drug) and quercetin (OTC Supplement). Hat tip to Aubrey De Gray for kicking this beehive back in the 00s. It probably wouldn't have happened without him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @09:35AM
Not entirely unsupported theory= unsupported theory. See "Sympathetic Magic", referenced above.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:18PM (1 child)
People tend also to be pleased with the results of Placebos.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:43PM
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/making-old-hearts-younger/ [harvard.edu]
Denial is not a river in Egypt, and this thing has more supporting evidence than global warming.