Have they done this experiment with any other configurations of carbon?
Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
#42at the risk of sounding strange, is this or anything similar available to buy anywhere?
This is one of the big problems with the supplement industry. The moment one small scale, unreplicated study shows potential for a compound people jump all over it regardless of the fact that it hasn't been shown to be safe in humans and the actual experiment hasn't been replicated.
Re: Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not likely, since statistical tests were performed to ensure that the results seen were not due to random chance. The sample size they used is actually pretty large for studies like this. However, the study is complicated since rats are sensitive to abdominal gavages and it tends to reduce their lifespan. Similarly, there are studies that show chronic administration of olive oil increases life span. So you have a sit…
Those tests for statistical significance aren't very strong in this case. It might be that the study in question only had a 5% chance of giving this result by chance, but given that this particular study was selected to our attention for news-worthiness the actual chance of it being a valid result are far less than 95%[1]. Also, a sizeable minority of published papers have statistical errors, even in good journals[2]…
You are right in general, but the study in question actually claims 99.9% significance, not 95%. That's pretty strong.
Re: Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those tests for statistical significance aren't very strong in this case. It might be that the study in question only had a 5% chance of giving this result by chance, but given that this particular study was selected to our attention for news-worthiness the actual chance of it being a valid result are far less than 95%[1]. Also, a sizeable minority of published papers have statistical errors, even in good journals[2]…
You are right in general, but the study in question actually claims 99.9% significance, not 95%. That's pretty strong.
Ah, thank you for pointing that out. It changes things quite a bit.
Re: Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not likely, since statistical tests were performed to ensure that the results seen were not due to random chance. The sample size they used is actually pretty large for studies like this. However, the study is complicated since rats are sensitive to abdominal gavages and it tends to reduce their lifespan. Similarly, there are studies that show chronic administration of olive oil increases life span. So you have a sit…
An n of six per arm in a three-arm study is not "actually pretty large."
It's just a single paper by a single lab, and probably a pretty small lab. This isn't Merck running a clinical trial.
Re: Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
#46Interesting -- there are plenty of articles on fullerene administration to rats over the past 10 years [1], but no mention of longevity effects. [1]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=fullerene+rats
I just took a look myself and it turns out that there is evidence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17079053.
The thing is, you can't patent fullerene so it will never ever make a great deal of money as a supplemental treatment, and so likely won't get that much attention.