Is This the Key to Reversing Aging?

I've mentioned this before in another article (see here ).  Age is something that can be treated with a better understanding of the human body and great treatment technologies.

In essence, research shows that aging is a deterioration of human cells eventually leading to a critical part of the body shutting down.  The cells of the heart, brain, lungs or other tissues just get too badly damaged that the tissues and systems just can't function anymore.  And then we pass away.

Organizations like Human Longevity, inc. and the SENS Research Foundation in the US are focusing their entire resources in finding treatments for one or several of the 7 biological causes of aging:

1. Cell loss / atrophy
2. Death-resistant cells
3. Nuclear mutations and epimutations
4. mtDNA mutations
5. Protein crosslinks
6. Junk accumulated inside cells
7. Junk accumulated outside cells

I mentioned earlier this year there was a treatment that was going to human trials sometime in 2017 that would help with the some causes of aging (nuclear mutations and mtDNA mutations). 

Scientists have also made some headway in correcting another cellular problem that occurs with age:  cell loss without any replacements.  You've probably heard that cells divide only a certain number of times in our body's life (those that aren't stem cells that is, which is the majority of the cells in our body).  Scientists think that this is because of a part of our chromosomes, the tail ends, or telomeres, which shorten with time, eventually making cellular division impossible.  Thus cells that die don't get replaced, leading to a whole lot of aging-related issues.

Researchers at the Houston Methodist Research Institute did some research recently with patients affected by progeria.  Progeria is a genetic disease where babies are born with accelerated aging, to such an extent that they look like 80 year olds by the age of 12 or so, and typically die of age-related issues by the age of 15.   The researchers treated patients with RNA molecules that encode RNA telomerase forcing the progeria patients to produce RNA telomerase in their own cells.  RNA telomerase then works on elongating the telomeres in each cell.  

The results were encouraging because most patients' cells started dividing normally again, helping with the regeneration of tissues and also reducing the amount of inflammatory proteins the cells produce (toxic in high levels).  In essence, the laboratory was able to reverse part of the person's aging processes by making the cells act as if they were younger.  

Other laboratories are working on fixing the gene that causes this problem in the first place, possibly using the CRISPR protein complex.  That would be best.  However, the work of the Houston laboratory does relieve the disease's symptoms in patients and have given us a tool that could be used on anyone to help counter and reverse some of the processes related to aging.

That's great stuff but to me the most impressive discovery around aging came from the researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who have found that adult stem cells located specifically in the hypothalamus may be responsible to activate multiple mechanisms of aging altogether.

I talk about this particular discovery further and it's potential impacts in the video below:

Now, we know that these hypothalamus stem cells are responsible for neurogenesis (the generation of new neurons) and we know from measurements that the population of these specific stem cells decreases as an animal ages (including humans).

We also know from the research that these stem cells produce what we call micro RNA (miRNA) that seem to have no other function except for regulating the expression of various genes in the body.  Contrary to most RNA that never leave the cell where they are produced, these flow into the bloodstream and enter other cells in the body.  So as the population of these stem cells decreases with time, less miRNA is produced ergo fewer genes that are regulated are activated or deactivated when needed.

According to my information we know little about which genes the hypothalamus-produced miRNA regulate but it they seem to be important in keeping tissues young because when the Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers injected miRNA into the brains of old mice or mice that had their hypothalamus stem cells destroyed, many aging-related symptoms were halted or even reversed.  The results were the same if the researchers injected stem cells into the mice's hypothalamus region.

We can only speculate that if we can keep the stem cell population of our hypothalamus at a high level, many aging-related issues would be averted.  So far, I don't think we know why these cells die off over time, because stem cells typically just keep reproducing themselves infinitely and do not age like differentiated tissue cells.

A researcher in longevity that I know, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, from the SENS Research Foundation, when asked about the potential of this particular discovery, told me that for now, the impact of it all isn't that significant, but I have a sneaky suspicion that many of the age-related issues are related to one another through these hypothalamus adult stem cells.

Time and more research will tell...