Human Ageing Reversed in ‘Holy Grail’ Study, Scientists Say
independent.co.ukRecently on HN:
>The subjects were placed in a pressurised chamber and given pure oxygen for 90 minutes a day, five days a week for three months.
>It is understood that instead the effects were the result of the pressurised chamber inducing a state of hypoxia, or oxygen shortage, which caused the cell regeneration.
This article is garbage. What they are reporting makes no sense. Putting people in a HYPERbaric oxygen chamber shouldn't make them HYPOxic, which is what they are suggesting causes the age-reversing effect.
This fundamental misunderstanding gives me little faith they have in any way correctly interpreted and reported on the study.
Didn't read this article, but saw this in another article:
> Every 20 minutes, the participants were asked to remove their masks for five minutes, bringing their oxygen back to normal levels. However, during this period, researchers saw that fluctuations in the free oxygen concentration were interpreted at the cellular level as a lack of oxygen – rather than interpreting the absolute level of oxygen.
> In other words, repeated intermittent hyperoxic (increased oxygen level) exposures induced many of the mediators and cellular mechanisms that are usually induced during hypoxia (decreased oxygen levels) – something Efrati explained is called the hyperoxic-hypoxic paradox. “The oxygen fluctuation we generated is what is important,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “During this process, a state of oxygen shortage resulted, which caused cell regeneration.”
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-scientists-say-...
Why would oxygen shortage lead to cell generation ? If I regularly choke myself, will I end up living longer ?
That's what pranayama says
Hormesis is a fairly common theme in human biology.
We seem to be at our best when under mild stressors.
> Hormesis has been observed in a number of cases in humans and animals exposed to chronic low doses of ionizing radiation. A-bomb survivors who received high doses exhibited shortened lifespan and increased cancer mortality, but at low-dose radiation the ratios of cancer deaths in A-bomb survivors are smaller than those of Japanese averages
(from Wikipedia)
I had never heard of hormesis before. Fascinating and a bit counter intuitive
You could just live at a higher altitude.
Were there any tangible benefits observed? Did the participants' heath quantifiably improve in any way? This kind of observation is missing from the article; if the expected benefits of telomere length is increased health and longevity, does the lack of such result suggest that they are less involved in aging than we think?
The main outcome of the study was to measure an in improvement in cognition: https://www.aging-us.com/article/202188/text
There doesn't seem to be any mention of cognition as a result in the article. The primary endpoint was telomere length.
Sorry, that was a different study that they cite: "Cognitive enhancement of healthy older adults using hyperbaric oxygen: a randomized controlled trial" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32589613/
Telomeres are intentionally shortened by the body, a process which is no doubt favored by evolution. While we don't know why for sure, it is entirely possible that telomere shortening actually lengthens life.
As telomeres become shorter, cell division becomes slower and metabolism decreases. This means that an older person's cells will reproduce at a slower rate than a younger person's in general. If we suppose that every cell division poses an equal chance at producing a life threatening cancer, then slower cell reproduction at a higher age would likely be beneficial.
Of course this is just speculation, but likely there is _some_ health benefit to telomere shortening otherwise we would not have evolved to do it.
I think you're assuming evolution is smarter than it is. Telomeres make sense as an anti-cancer mechanism by making it less likely that cells replicate infinitely. The fact they also put a hard limit on age is not a problem as long as genetic carriers manage to reproduce.
"In the large majority of cancer cells, telomere length is maintained by telomerase."
My guess is that the shortening of telomeres—and the presumed aging effects—is evolutionarily beneficial because it sets an expiration date on your life. If people could live forever they may prohibit other younger and genetically different people from reproducing and introducing variety in the gene pool.
Certainly having wealthier people live forever now would be bad from a social perspective. Time is really the biggest factor in acquiring wealth and influence. If that goes unchecked then that power can become out of control. Realistically I dont think it was that different thousands of years ago.
What may be a good mechanism for simple single-cellular, multi-cellular organisms, or even complex animals, is not necessarily a good mechanism for humans. If you’d like to argue that the omniscient deity intends humanity to die then perhaps that can be an acceptable philosophical argument. But evolution as a non-omniscient mechanism is not guaranteed to be an optimally benevolent process. There is no reason in that context to say that mortality is necessary for humanity other than negative emotions.
With biomedical and technological advancements, this scenario is highly likely. At some point in the future, I can envision almost a divergence in human species - those who age naturally and live similar to how we do today, and those who’s wealth has afforded them medical and technical enhancements prolonging their lives, enhancing their abilities, and allowing them to control vast amounts of resources. Perhaps they will at least keep us as beloved family pets.
The Netflix series Altered Carbon explores the idea of an immortal class. However, I can’t imagine that an advancement so compelling as immortality will not trickle down in some aspect. The majority of the developed world’s middle class benefits from initially complex and expensive technologies such as air travel, cancer treatment, and advanced computing — differences for the ultra-rich are marginal, not absolute.
Telomeres aren’t longer because people aren’t choosing to reproduce exclusively with people who produce long telomeres.
Seems like pure speculation. There are a thousand different mechanisms that would explain it and would not mean "there is some health benefit". Is there a health benefit of white hair? Of wrinkles? Of ...?
Quite the opposite seems true in fact. Evolution tries make us be on our peak at the reproductive age, and a lot of that happens after is a byproduct/consequence of this, not just for health benefits. Most (all?) of the biological "health indicators" decline after this peak age.
The white haired ones are for data storage not reproduction.
There's a theory that setting an expiration on cellular division can help prevent cancer.
Junk article. It's certainly not a "holy grail"...the study just measured telomere length after HBOT. Even meditation has been shown to reduce telomere length. It certainly didn't "reverse human aging".
HN people: please stop posting these junk newspaper articles that completely misrepresent the science.
You mean meditation have been shown to increase telomeres' length, right?
Yes, increase. Not able to edit my comment.
> chamber inducing a state of hypoxia, or oxygen shortage, which caused the cell regeneration.
Might actually be related to life extension through calorie restriction in this regard. This paper re calories restriction mentions:
> caloric restriction improves whole body energy efficiency by inducing the biogenesis of mitochondria that utilize less oxygen and produce less reactive oxygen species (ROS). https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Starving the body of oxygen might trigger some of the same genetic pathways as starving it of food, basically.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3901353/
I thought the free radical/antioxidant stuff was done with?
The calorie restriction one says: > increased expression of genes encoding proteins involved in mitochondrial function such as PPARGC1A, TFAM, eNOS, SIRT1, and PARL
Meanwhile SIRT1 has been proven to be life extending via genetically engineering mice to have it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6291425/
So the claim of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3901353/ that this is just shifting damage from one type of damage to another and can't prolong life doesn't seem to hold water.
Before anyone goes too nuts with this, keep in mind that your body is constantly evolving throughout your life via epigenetic suppression of certain genes. As you expose yourself to new bodily stresseors (regular exposure to a much more reactive atmosphere than normal) you may not be turning "back" aging, but rather reactivating old eukaryotic coping mechanisms evolved long ago, but not employed regularly since circumstances have changed. If you further cease to expose yourself to that stressor, your body will slowly shift away from utilizing those metabolic pathways back to something more efficient given the set of stressors in your typical environment.
Higher concentrations of oxygen from your respiratory system would likely signal the need in your entire body to upregulate cell division, due to oxidative stress both internal and external. It could also kick in metabolic processes that are not as efficient is substantially lower lower O2 partial pressure environments.
Nevermind the fire hazard. Pro-Tip: With enough 02 around, and nothing else to get in the way, everything burns with comparatively little inducement to do so.
Light reading https://www.eiga.eu/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=208&token=c...
https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1448.pdf
There were a few other good searches I did long ago for another random walk of whimsy, but I seem to have lost track of them. I'll see if I can find them again.
I eagerly await the coming flood of DIY oxygen chamber tutorials. Hopefully no one gets hurt.
FWIW: high concentration O2 is known to be toxic in other ways. It causes lung inflamation at least (oxygen is, after all, highly reactive and tends to break up lots of different molecules). I think there's a real possibility that this does more harm than good.
I think fire would be the most direct concern. IIRC, a lot of things become flammable in a high or pure O2 atmosphere that aren't normally considered flammable.
Ozone (O3) is definitely the one that is very reactive and bad for your lungs.
Ozone is indeed acutely toxic. But no, plain O2 will attack pretty much anything (i.e. literally everything in your body can be "burned") with a reaction rate that depends on concentration. At a partial pressure of 0.2 bar, that's negligible, but it stops being so at some point.
It's a known thing in diving planning, here's a wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
Now, I'm sure these chambers aren't at those pressures. But everything is likely linear, and the thing they're "curing" is literally what we currently consider to be the normal baseline! Even a very small effect will swamp whatever longevity benefits they're seeing are.
Rough heuristic: if it’s a “science” article from the Independent, it’s probably bullshit.
Shouldn't longer telomeres increase the likelihood of cancer?