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In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

nature.com

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Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#31

Post by jjoonathan »

DuskStar wrote: post #11
scottlocklin wrote: post #6

1) DHEA is not a diabetes med. In fact it's a steroid (not really an anabolic one, though it is a precursor to anabolics) and illegal in the EU. It is a substance which is lowered in older people, so older people supplement with it. 2) Metformin is a diabetes med, and it's used by antiaging enthusiasts independently and along with growth hormone 3) Fasting creates larger growth hormone spikes, and improves sugar clea…

> So does fasting, and it don't cost as much. If a "rich old white dude" could get the health benefits of fasting for a bit of cash, a lot of them are going to pay it. Lifestyle changes are hard, while cash is 'easy' for a significant part of what I imagine to be the target market. EDIT: Apparently I should clarify the "old white dude" part of this. The study in question consisted entirely of "9 white men between 51…

> rich old white dude

Why attach race, age, gender, and class to the idea that lifestyle changes are hard? I'm pretty sure everyone finds them hard.

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#32

Post by jjoonathan »

aflag wrote: post #25
jhedwards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine there's a fundamental limitation in DNAs ability to be copied over and over without information loss.

Hasn't it been doing so for billions of years now?

Only with strong selective pressure killing off the bad mutations (with is many/most of them).

"But most human babies don't die. There are a bunch of mutations per generation, but not an exponentially compounded bunch of infant deaths, so how does our population get rid of bad mutations?"

Because sperm are unit tests. The overwhelming majority of them die. You've got to regularly run the unit tests if you want to keep the codebase healthy :)

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#33

Post by shrimp_emoji »

zarkov99 wrote: post #30
DuskStar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does fasting, and it don't cost as much. If a "rich old white dude" could get the health benefits of fasting for a bit of cash, a lot of them are going to pay it. Lifestyle changes are hard, while cash is 'easy' for a significant part of what I imagine to be the target market. EDIT: Apparently I should clarify the "old white dude" part of this. The study in question consisted entirely of "9 white men between 51…

why white and dude? aren't there other kinds of rich people? and wouldn't they also pay?

Statistics

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#34

Post by gingabriska »

scottlocklin wrote: post #6

1) DHEA is not a diabetes med. In fact it's a steroid (not really an anabolic one, though it is a precursor to anabolics) and illegal in the EU. It is a substance which is lowered in older people, so older people supplement with it. 2) Metformin is a diabetes med, and it's used by antiaging enthusiasts independently and along with growth hormone 3) Fasting creates larger growth hormone spikes, and improves sugar clea…

>3) Fasting creates larger growth hormone spikes, and improves sugar clearance. Dunno what it does to DHEA; eat lots of eggs for that one.

Does it really mean that if some guy has fast in teenage, he can grow taller or more muscular?

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#36

Post by mindslight »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #33
zarkov99 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why white and dude? aren't there other kinds of rich people? and wouldn't they also pay?

Statistics

Plus ça change. I wouldn't have thought racism would become popular again, but here we are.

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#37

Post by thfuran »

SolarNet wrote: post #20
jhedwards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine there's a fundamental limitation in DNAs ability to be copied over and over without information loss.

Sure, but we can correct for that, we have the ability to reliably store copies of the information in DNA (a person's full genome is only a few gigabytes) with error correction (or at least verification).

Our cells are mostly diploid. But some organisms have many more copies of each chromosome - strawberries have eight. With that kind of redundancy, it should be vanishingly unlikely for a random error in DNA replication to make it into a majority of copies and any systematic error severe enough to cause it probably messes up the cell enough for it to be culled by other mechanisms.

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#38

Post by issa »

jjoonathan wrote: post #31
DuskStar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does fasting, and it don't cost as much. If a "rich old white dude" could get the health benefits of fasting for a bit of cash, a lot of them are going to pay it. Lifestyle changes are hard, while cash is 'easy' for a significant part of what I imagine to be the target market. EDIT: Apparently I should clarify the "old white dude" part of this. The study in question consisted entirely of "9 white men between 51…

> rich old white dude Why attach race, age, gender, and class to the idea that lifestyle changes are hard? I'm pretty sure everyone finds them hard.

I believe the point wasn't about who finds lifestyle changes to be hard, but who has the disposable cash to pay for medicine instead.

Re: In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’

#40

Post by mensetmanusman »

throwaway_law wrote: post #28
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #13

It just dawned on me that getting old and dying is most likely an evolutionary chicken and egg problem. If you didn't get old and die, evolution of your species would grind to a halt. Getting old and dying is required for evolution to transpire. I can't see any reason why it must be an absolute truth.

Biological immortality in plants and animals isn't unheard of. Take Jelly Fish, they are biologically immortal, been around 500 million years, not to bad. They were the first animals to evolve nervous systems, not sure the timeline of the biological immortality evolution, but they must have continued evolving because there are different species (some have evolved eyes and others not) and I believe all species are bio…

Are you saying there is a floating jelly fish in the ocean that is 500 million years old (‘years old’ in the common parlance of usage)?
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