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Old Spleens Suck (2021)
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#42I've been without a spleen for longer than I had one. I wonder if -- if any of this translates to humans -- spleens are beneficial to the young but a risk to the old, meaning that since I survived my youth without, it's all good going forward; or if young spleens give long-lasting benefits, meaning that the best course is to have the spleen into old age, but then jettison it later in life (than I did).
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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At least it was related to the decision to remove a spleen or not. In at least one case I now know of, in a young patient they decided to keep the spleen. In some cases hearing of unextraordinary events helps to calibrate what extraordinary is. I have never suffered a spleen injury, but have heard of lots of young men having theirs removed when I was younger. This anecdote leads me to believe those may have been extr…
Mine was lost due to rupture in a motorcycle accident. The doctors didn't say whether keeping it was an option, but I doubt it: it came with a bunch of broken ribs and two punctured/collapsed lungs, so my body had more than a few things to deal with, and fixing a spleen was probably low on the list.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Spleens are one of the more vulnerable organs. They're prone to rupture during trauma, and if ruptured, can easily cause a person to bleed out. In many motorcyclist accidents, a ruptured spleen can be the cause of death. Spleens are essentially large bags of blood and immunological pulp, and the reason they evolved this way is because they act as a filter against bloodborne pathogens. They host a diverse but speciali…
> You should read up on the thymus next. That one is super important and is also implicated in aging.
That one seems to self-deactivate with age.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#45I'm getting my spleen removed on the 11th of April. I'll let y'all know how it going in a few years. I'd do anything to fight back these wrinkles.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
One end of the spectrum of reasonable possibilities is that evolution selected for genes that cause and or favor death the older an organism gets, through implicit mechanisms like lack of regenerative capacity, such as heart tissue, or explicit mechanisms, of which I'm not aware of any. Are there any genes that explicitly produce a timing mechanism, and thereby create a built-in notion of aging? To my knowledge, it's…
> Are there any genes that explicitly produce a timing mechanism, and thereby create a built-in notion of aging? Yes, telomeres. Telomeres set a count on how many times a cell can divide before it ceases to divide and becoming old and useless; in humans, the count is 40-60 divisions and then the cell essentially dies. There may be other timing mechanisms that haven't been discovered as well.
It's less of a timing and more like of a "TTL" of a network packet. If you don't divide you don't use them up, even if you could live a thousand years. If you keep dividing like crazy, it will eventually reach useful DNA and the cell will die.
They seem to be quite specifically an anti-cancer measure.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#47I've been without a spleen for longer than I had one. I wonder if -- if any of this translates to humans -- spleens are beneficial to the young but a risk to the old, meaning that since I survived my youth without, it's all good going forward; or if young spleens give long-lasting benefits, meaning that the best course is to have the spleen into old age, but then jettison it later in life (than I did).
Did you get vaccines to compensate? I've been told there are three that I need, but not sure when or if I need boosters.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#48I think it is obvious at this point that the human body is designed to self-destruct, causing death at old age, once a certain biological threshold is reached. Resistance to this idea comes not from a rational perspective, but a semi-religious belief that your own body would not betray you.
There's little incentive for the repair processes to be perfect. There would actually be zero incentive after we reproduce - and some species are exactly like that. The moment you reproduce, you die.
Humans, being a social species, might have pushed evolution towards trying to repair a bit more than it should. Older humans can still contribute - sometimes a lot - to the group. Older males can still reproduce in many cases.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The programmed aging theory may be "obvious" but there is not really evidence to support it as of the present. If true, it would likely be very easy to stop aging (there would likely be some mechanism in cells causing aging that could simply be switched off), but this has not been borne out by research so far, and this is despite the fact that much anti-aging researching assumes it to be true. The preponderance of th…
I don’t think it is at all necessarily true that there would be one mechanism for programmed aging that could be disabled by modern medicine. Rather, evolutionary pressures might cause many mechanisms to develop simultaneously to prevent aging of individuals too far beyond the point of reproductive viability. If aging is caused by built-up damage, how would babies ever come to exist and live normal lifespans? The cel…
That's two different kinds of damage.
The human genome is clearly extremely well preserved and is has not changed all that much in hundreds of thousands of years.
However for an individual human, damage to tissues occurs.
For example, if you lose a tooth, it is not going to grow back even though you still have "tooth genes". And this damage is happening to every system of the body e.g. pretty much everybody has atherosclerosis and eventually all humans will die from it if they live long enough.
To increase human lifespan we have to fix all of this entropic damage, which is not impossible but requires advances in medical technology, such as growing new tissue to replace damaged tissue.
Re: Old Spleens Suck (2021)
#50Huh. Well, this is interesting. As someone who’s been sans spleen since age eight, all I ever heard or read about was my risk for minor bacterial infections to potentially turn into overwhelming sepsis. I was put on penicillin VK 250 mg twice a day prophylactically from the time of my splenectomy until age seventeen, when I transferred to an adult primary care physician instead of my pediatrician. I have to get the p…
Mine was removed in my twenties. I got the recommendation for pneumovax, and the warning about sudden overwhelming infection, but other than that, nothing too serious.