On a whim I searched "NAD depletion Senescence Apoptosis Autophagy" After scanning some of the results I'm wondering for those of us on a NAD boosting regimen if we might be helping to hold on to some of our cellular baggage? As I scan these articles NAD depletion seems to be a necessary condition in this multi staged process of cells moving into senescence and later cell death. If this NAD stress is necessary to weed out these zombie cells maybe part of our future plan to eliminate senescence cells might be a washout period where we stop any NAD boosting some days before taking our senolytic drugs.
This is speculation but I wouldn't want to rescue the same cells I was wanting to eliminate. Any opinions?
Okay, but don't you think you would want to measure your NAD+ / NADH ratio levels before you go off on grand experiments to manipulate it?!
Dr Joseph Baur - of Harvard resveratrol fame - was nice enough to share with me papers and ideas on how one could get an approximation of NAD+ / NADH by measurements of Pyruvate and L-Lactate, as well as making underlying assumptions about pH of H+ in the environment outside the mitochondria. My level of science understanding was barely able to understand it, but I did come up with a spreadsheet that embedded the calculations, and then I tested my formulas by researching various studies showing measurements of lactate and pyruvate in humans in various conditions. That gave me a very good sense of what ratios are normal and which are pathological, in humans.
I found a test for lactate and pyruvate done by a private lab owned by Quest, but each of two times they did this for me the lab gathering the blood screwed it up and the test could not be run. So taking care to research the preparation of the sample and finding a competent lab to gather the blood is critical.
If one of the super-scientists here like Niner wants to audit my work I would be happy to share it. I view the spreadsheet as a long term resource that I want to improve on.
Random thoughts on manipulating NAD+:
* NAD+ is mostly a product of complex 1 of the electron transport chain (ETC), so a pathological NAD+ level might be evidence of failure in the ETC.
* You might want to research what ozone therapy does, because one of the speculated mechanisms of action of this form of oxidation therapy is that it results in a cascade that produces a huge amount of NAD+. This may be why people with chronic fatigue seem to do so well with that therapy, particularly ozone infusions.
* You might be able to infer your NAD+ level indirectly by taking an exercise physiology test VO2Max (including CO2 data, which is not commonly provided). This will clearly indicate if your aerobic metabolism in the mitochondria is broken (i.e., are you going into full on glycolysis at low levels of workload). If aerobic metabolism is broken, you might be able to infer that your NAD+/NADH ratios are not great.
* The other side of the coin here is that if you manipulate your NAD+ to very high levels, are you manipulating your electron transport chain, and thereby increasing the amount of ROS you subject your mitochondria to? It might feel incredibly great to have very high NAD+ levels, but you might actually be aging yourself faster. Getting a proper balance between pathological fatigue (e.g., low NAD+/NADH) and super-energetic (e.g., high NAD+/NADH) would be important.
A personal frustration I have with Longecity - and most of the online blogs on nutrition and science and health - is that people are very anxious to do N=1 experiments where they manipulate multiple variables simultaneously, while at the same time measuring no metabolites before and after the experiment. Manipulating too many variables at once means you lose the ability to establish even rough causality. Failure to measure metabolites before and after means you have no real experiment and any subjective result is subject to placebo effects (which are extraordinarily difficult to overcome, even for a very disciplined and trained observer).
NAD+/NADH ratios are one of my favorite topics. I would love to see people do N=1 experiments around that. But have a measurement of that before and after, otherwise what exactly are you testing? The person with a pathological low NAD+/NADH who further suppresses that ratio is going to feel miserable and fatigued (most likely). The person with "pathological" high NAD+/NADH might actually feel better with lower NAD+ levels. I don't think it is safe to make generalizations like "more NAD+ is better".
Edited by pone11, 27 February 2016 - 09:38 PM.