Dear Moderator:
I attempted to start a New York City LongeCity group in order to bring together other like minded groups, interested in aging and possible also in other areas. The groups can be national and international.
One way to do this is with on line communications. Individual and international groups can meet on line from their homes.
One way of doing this is with Google Hangouts. It allows up to one hundred people to talk to each during a meeting. Up to ten people can commumicate with video at a time. The service is free. There are commercial services available usually from $19.00 to $50.00 monthly.
In 1975 I made a suggestion to the American Aging Association, which is the oldest American research organization in the United States,. to start an aging research fund. They refused. There is no Aging research fund in our country. We need one. Having an aging research fund will accomplish two objectives. It will raise money for aging research and will educate the people that something can be done about aging.
Our country spends $2,700,000,000,000 a year for medical care. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it wil cost about $4,000,000,000,000 a year for medical care by 2025. One percent of the people use 21% of the medical cost. That amounts to about $200,000 for each person. That means that !% of our people use $560,000,000,000. The top 5% of our population use $1,350,000,000 or $88,000 perperson for health care.Fifty percent of the population spend only 2.8% of health care costs. That is under $500.00 per person which comes to about $75,000,000,000.
If all people could be put in the top 50% of the health care system, current medical expenses would go from $2,700,000,000
to $150,000,000,000. That would be a saving of about $2,550,000,000,000. Obviously that isn't practical in the near future.
We can aim to reduce health care cost by bringing as amny people as possible into the 50% category or as close to it as possible.
We would also save hundreds of billions of dollars yearly from Social Security Disability, welfare, food stamps, special transportation, private payments for home care and nursing home care, etc. There will be less need for government assistance which liberals, moderates and conservatives want.
The National Institutes of Health budget was cut about $*,000,000,000 a year when we take inflation into account. The Federal Government spends about $89,000,000,000 for military and space research. The government spends about $39,000,000,000 for medical research. We should at least spend the same amount of money for medical research as we spend for military and space research.
Only two people showed up for the last meeting. Calahan communicated with me asking that I conduct another meeting in September. I told him that I would only conduct another meeting if he released the approxametly 299 subscribers that they have so that I can tell them about the meeting. I previously asked for the E - mail addresses but did not ge them. We can't work without them We can work on line.
I am enclosing two articles about the breakthroughs that may be taking place with GDF11. One is a New York Time article and the other is from Science Alert.
SCIENCE
Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging
By CARL ZIMMER
MAY 4, 2014
Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.
“I am extremely excited,” said Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “These findings could be a game changer.”
The research builds on centuries of speculation that the blood of young people contains substances that might rejuvenate older adults.
In the 1950s, Clive M. McCay of Cornell University and his colleagues tested the notion by delivering the blood of young rats into old ones. To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. After this procedure, called parabiosis, blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. The blood from the young rat flowed into the old one, and vice versa.
Later, Dr. McCay and his colleagues performed necropsies and found that the cartilage of the old rats looked more youthful than it would have otherwise. But the scientists could not say how the transformations happened. There was not enough known at the time about how the body rejuvenates itself.
It later became clear that stem cells are essential for keeping tissues vital. When tissues are damaged, stem cells move in and produce new cells to replace the dying ones. As people get older, their stem cells gradually falter.
In the early 2000s, scientists realized that stem cells were not dying off in aging tissues.
“There were plenty of stem cells there,” recalled Thomas A. Rando, a professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “They just don’t get the right signals.”
Dr. Rando and his colleagues wondered what signals the old stem cells would receive if they were bathed in young blood. To find out, they revived Dr. McCay’s experiments.
The scientists joined old and young mice for five weeks and then examined them. The muscles of the old mice had healed about as quickly as those of the young mice, the scientists reported in 2005. In addition, the old mice had grown new liver cells at a youthful rate.
The young mice, on the other hand, had effectively grown prematurely old. Their muscles had healed more slowly, and their stem cells had not turned into new cells as quickly as they had before the procedure.
The experiment indicated that there were compounds in the blood of the young mice that could awaken old stem cells and rejuvenate aging tissue. Likewise, the blood of the old mice had compounds that dampened the resilience of the young mice.
Amy J. Wagers, a member of Dr. Rando’s team, continued to study the blood of young mice after she moved in 2004 to Harvard, where she is an associate professor. Last year, she and her colleagues demonstrated that it could rejuvenate the hearts of old mice.
To pinpoint the molecules responsible for the change, Dr. Wagers and her colleagues screened the animals’ blood and found that a protein called GDF11 was abundant in young mice and scarce in old ones. To see if GDF11 was crucial to the parabiosis effect, the scientists produced a supply of the protein and injected it into old mice. Even on its own, GDF11 rejuvenated their hearts.
Dr. Wagers and her colleagues wondered whether GDF11 was responsible for the rejuvenation of other tissues. In the current issue of the journal Science, they report an experiment on skeletal muscle in mice. They found that GDF11 revived stem cells in old muscles, making old mice stronger and increasing their endurance.
At Stanford, researchers were investigating whether the blood of young mice altered the brains of old mice. In 2011, Saul Villeda, then a graduate student, and his colleagues reported that it did. When old mice received young blood, they had a burst of new neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is crucial for forming memories.
In a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, Dr. Villeda, now a faculty fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues unveiled more details of what young blood does to the brains of old mice.
After parabiosis, Dr. Villeda and his colleagues found that the neurons in the hippocampus of the old mice sprouted new connections. They then moved beyond parabiosis by removing the cells and platelets from the blood of young mice and injecting the plasma that remained into old mice. That injection caused the old mice to perform far better on memory tests.
Dr. Wagers’s team has been investigating a specific region of the brain involved in perceiving smells.
In a second study in Science, the team reported that parabiosis spurred thegrowth of blood vessels in the brain. The new blood supply led to the growth of neurons and gave older mice a sharper sense of smell.
After linking the GDF11 protein to the rejuvenation of skeletal muscle and the heart, Dr. Wagers and her colleagues studied whether the protein was also responsible for the changes in the brain. They injected GDF11 alone into the mice and found that it spurred the growth of blood vessels and neurons in the brain, although the change was not as large as that from parabiosis.
“There’s no conflict between the two groups, which is heartening,” said Dr. Richard M. Ransohoff, director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. Ransohoff and others hope the experiments on mice will lead to studies on people to see if the human version of GDF11, or other molecules in the blood of young people, has a similar effect on older adults.
“We can turn back the clock instead of slowing the clock down,” said Dr. Toren Finkel, director of the Center for Molecular Medicine at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “That’s a nice thought if it pans out.”
This reversal could occur throughout the body, the new research suggests. “Instead of taking a drug for your heart and a drug for your muscles and a drug for your brain, maybe you could come up with something that affected them all,” Dr. Wagers said.
But scientists would need to take care in rejuvenating old body parts. Waking up stem cells might lead to their multiplying uncontrollably.
“It is quite possible that it will dramatically increase the incidence of cancer,” said Irina M. Conboy, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “You have to be careful about overselling it.”
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Alzheimer’s patients to be treated with the blood of under-30s
ScienceAlert Staff
Thursday, 21 August 2014
Alzheimer’s patients in the US will be given transfusions of young people's blood as part of a promising new treatment that’s nowhere near as crazy as it sounds.
Image: alexskopje/Shutterstock
This October, people with mild to moderate levels of Alzheimer’s disease will receive a transfusion of blood plasma from donors aged under 30.
The trial, run by researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine in the US, follows their revolutionary study involving lab mice, where the blood plasma of young mice was injected into old mice, resulting in a marked improvement in their physical endurance and cognitive function. Completed earlier this year, their research, combined with independent studies by a handful of research teams around the world, pin-pointed a plasma-borne protein called growth differentiation factor 11 - or GDF11 - as a key factor in the young blood’s powers of rejuvenation.
"We saw these astounding effects,” lead researcher and professor of neurology at Stanford, Tony Wyss-Coray, told Helen Thomson at New Scientist. "The human blood had beneficial effects on every organ we've studied so far."
Getting approval for their October trial has been fairly straightforward, he said, because blood transfusion therapy has such a long history of safe use in medical procedures, but the team will still keep a very careful eye on how the patients are progressing once they’ve received the young blood. "We will assess cognitive function immediately before and for several days after the transfusion, as well as tracking each person for a few months to see if any of their family or carers report any positive effects," he told Thomson at New Scientist. "The effects might be transient, but even if it's just for a day it is a proof of concept that is worth pursuing.”
Without wanting to get ahead of ourselves just yet, if the trial ends up being a raging success and the Stanford team can prove once and for all that young blood reverses the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases such as cancer, we’re going to need a whole lot more donors to meet demand around the world. Or, as Wyss-Coray told New Scientist, the hope is that continued research will identify the individual components in the plasma that are contributing to the positive effects - such as GDF11 - and get these synthesised into new types of drugs.
"It would be great if we could identify several factors that we could boost in older people," he said. "Then we might be able to make a drug that does the same thing. We also want to know what organ in the body produces these factors. If we knew that, maybe we could stimulate that tissue in older people."
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