Medicine may soon be able to rejuvenate your blood
/Pop culture has long been fascinated by the idea of restoring youth by consuming the blood of young donors.
From fans of vampire fiction to supporters of the pseudoscience of young-blood transfusions, blood has been at the center of many myths about rejuvenation.
Some recent research suggests young blood has a rejuvenating effect when infused into older bodies. But, so far, the benefits of transfusion have been unproven.
Today, science is closing in on the ability to actually rejuvenate a person’s blood – not by magically changing the blood, but by restoring the body’s ability to produce it.
A study published in Nature Cell Biology found that an anti-inflammatory drug approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis can turn back time in mice and reverse some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system that consists of organs and tissues – primarily the bone marrow, spleen, tonsils, and lymph nodes – involved in the production of blood.
Researchers used anakinra, an interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) that is normally prescribed to reduce the effects and slow the damage of moderate to severe active rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in people 18 and older.
The study found that an inflammatory signal released from old bone marrow, IL-1B, was critical in driving aging in blood stem cells. Blocking the signal with the drug anakinra, blood stem cells were returned to a younger, healthier state.
Emmanuelle Passegué, director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative and an author of the study, believes the findings hold promise for aging adults.
“A 70-year-old with a 40-year-old blood system could have a longer healthspan, if not a longer lifespan,” she told Columbia University. “Treating elderly patients with anti-inflammatory drugs blocking IL-1B function should help with maintaining healthier blood production.”
Passegué said she hopes the research will lead to clinical testing.
“We know that bone tissue begins to degrade when people are in their 50s. What happens in middle age? Why does the niche fail first?” she said. “Only by having a deep molecular understanding will it be possible to identify approaches that can truly delay aging.”
What’s most interesting, however, is that Passegué is no fan of blood transfusions to promote youth.
“An aging blood system, because it’s a vector for a lot of proteins, cytokines, and cells, has a lot of bad consequences for the organism,” she said.
At Methuselah Foundation, we are enthusiastic about science that restores the body’s ability to function as it did in a younger state. Aging remains inevitable but work like Passegué’s is important to maximizing the quality of our lives as we age – and fending off age-related diseases that cut life short far too soon.