About eternal life
Is eternal life possible with eternal youth?
Ilya Khel, Hi-News, based on Earth Chronicles News: Is eternal life possible with eternal youth?
A long life seems attractive, but as we age, we become carriers of whole bouquets of diseases and hardships of the later stages of life that prevent us from enjoying old age. Science is trying to create ways to extend a healthy life – not just life.
Although modern medicine and a healthy lifestyle allow us to live much longer than our ancestors, in many cases people have to literally cling to every extra year. While the healthy part of our life is prolonged, people remain healthy and active in old age, the rate of health preservation is not growing as fast as life expectancy in general.
Eternal life: a curse or a gift?
The very fact that people are living in old age for longer and longer is a cause for concern not only for individuals, but also for governments that are running out of resources to support an aging population. They are trying to solve the problem in a variety of ways, from the obvious ones – like increasing physical activity and reducing the diet – to more exotic ones, which were mainly tested only on animals, but which will eventually help us become young again.
"We will not be able to reverse aging," write the authors of the work published in Nature. "But we expect that it will be possible to mitigate this process and significantly improve its consequences."
Although the fundamental limit of how long people can live is always a lively debate, the authors note that those who live to 100 years, as a rule, have a later manifestation of signs of aging, which indicates the very possibility of postponing aging.
Moreover, recent studies show that human life expectancy is inherited by only 12-25%, which means that environmental and lifestyle factors can play a big role, many of which we can change. Special diets, calorie restriction, exercise and cognitive training are already used to treat certain conditions.
However, the authors note that people always respond to this kind of intervention in different ways. That is, it will be an important step for us to determine how various biomarkers like blood pressure, insulin levels, breathing, balance and consciousness can indicate the risk of certain problems in people and how best to cope with them before they unfold in full force.
Obviously, there are the simplest points to fulfill – do not smoke, drink less, exercise regularly. Another promising approach is fasting, which gives good results in both animals and humans. But while lifestyle changes can work wonders for individuals, it is often ineffective in general because it is very difficult for people to adhere to certain rules.
Medications may become a more common approach to solving the problem, and many adults are already taking various medications to prolong life, such as pills to normalize blood pressure and cholesterol. The search for new drugs specifically for prolonging life may be difficult due to the length of clinical trials, but many existing drugs designed to combat age-related diseases have shown a broad anti-aging effect in animals.
In fact, as the authors note, one of the biggest advances in aging research has been that most interventions, whether they focus on life or pharmacology, have proven effective in preventing more than one age-related disease at a time.
There are also more radical approaches to prevent aging that are just beginning to enter the mainstream. Senescent (aging) cells that stop dividing and cause inflammatory processes in their environment have long been involved in aging processes. A recent study showed that using a couple of drugs to kill them increased the life expectancy of old mice by 36%.
The therapy, designed to reprogram epigenetic markers responsible for regulating the genome and determining how active certain genes are, is also able to increase the lifespan of mice by 30% and even rejuvenate some of their tissues.
There are similar tantalizing results in favor of transplanting the microbiome – a unique community of microbes that lives in every person – or the blood plasma of healthy young people, which also helped in the rejuvenation of elderly animals.
Startup Elevian has raised millions of dollars to investigate whether a particular protein in young blood can rejuvenate, despite disagreements about how honest the science behind this idea is.
The transfer of treatment from laboratory animals to humans is always complicated by various factors. How many of these methods will really be effective for people and how many people will prefer to use them remains to be seen, but one thing is obvious: aging can be canceled and it is worth fighting for. The elixir of eternal youth may not be as far away as it seems.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru