How old are you? Are you sure that’s what your body thinks?
Rejuvenation. Health and quality of life it provides. Major things we all strive for this way or the other. How do we know how old our body actually is? Does our biological age actually correlate with our chronological age? Why do some people look better, younger and healthier at the same age as others? Can we live up to be older in age while our body actually stays younger?
Who do you think has the control over that? Our brain? The essence of who we are and at the same time our greatest mystery.
What if I told you that the answer is hidden in our bloodstream
As the body ages, the brain ages as well. In people, studies of the brain are, of course, limited on live personas. But what if the brain doesn’t even hold the key to rejuvenation? Studies from Stanford show what actually might change our whole perception of aging, treatment of age related diseases and our own life for that matter. It seems that the answers are hidden in the blood. As we get older our blood changes. Growth and survival factors in our blood decrease while inflammatory factors increase. Half of the blood factors change significantly between the young and the old. There are factors in our blood that can modulate the age of our tissue.
How does young blood influence old brain
Young blood rejuvenates it. In terms of higher activity, less inflammation and even better memory. The initial studies were performed on mice – young mice with connected bloodstreams to old mice and even old mice who received young human plasma injections. Both showed the same staggering results. Rejuvenation.
Why plasma? Because no cells enter the brain. The rejuvenating factors hidden in young blood are the factors soluble in plasma. So, mice who received injections of young human plasma actually showed that young human plasma helped the old mouse brain to become smarter, i.e. improved its memory functions.
And that’s only the beginning … what if in a foreseeable future, my young blood can help with your Alzheimers? Stanford is running a small clinical study …
In our Splice Summer Edition, we are featuring the video “How Young Blood Might Help Reverse Aging. Yes, Really” where Tony Wyss-Coray shares new research from his Stanford lab and other teams which shows that a solution for some of the less great aspects of old age might actually lie within us all. Enjoy!
By Tea Pavlek, MSc, BioSistemika LLC
