David Sinclair on a new paper about age reversal (Twitter Link)
Sinclair reviews an exciting new paper. From the Twitter thread:
18 rats were divided into three groups. 6 young rats (30 weeks old), 6 old rats (109 weeks old) & 6 old rats (also 109 weeks old) treated with plasma fractions from the young rats.
Blood was drawn at regular intervals for analyses to monitor the impact and cognitive functions were assessed 4 times. DNA methylation profiles of several organs were generated and age was calculated using six epigenetic clocks
The exciting part is that they a) did a very thorough job of looking at age markers and b) that they were using plasma fractions, not blood. So if done right, you could inject someone with a plasma fraction which would not provoke an immune response from the host.
So are the result believable? I see nothing wrong with the epigenetic clock analyses, the stats – Horvath is the best there is. It’s also hard to see how the other measures could be messed up. Controls Sure, I’d like to see more controls, quantification of images, etc.
From what I can tell, the old control group didn’t get injected with anything but saline. A better control would have been an injection of the old rats with old plasma fractions from rats of the same age, processed exactly the same way as the young plasma
If you are interested in other posts about ageing, have a look at my article about Phenoptosis – Are We Programmed to Die?