Current anti-aging strategies and issues:

Dr Xxxxx : Good Habits:

Most current medical advice to extend life focuses on preventive health. Vaccinations, good nutrition, appropriate exercise, and avoidance of hazards such as excess smoking or excess alcohol all feature prominently. Good nutritional habits have suggested the use of specific items, specific minerals and the use of specific amino acids to supplement normal nutrient intakes.

Vitamin A
Vitamin B
Vitamin C
Vitamin D
Vitamin E
Vitamin K

Calcium
Chromium
Iodine
Iron

Magnesium
Selenium
Zinc

Arginine
Carnitine
Carnosine
Glutamine
NAC


CoQ10
Pycnogenol
R-Lipoic Acid
Vitamin C
Omega-3
GLA
Krill Oil

Vitamins and Minerals in Aging

Dr Xxxxx : Caloric restriction
Some studies of the effect of calorie restriction suggest that it may have a protective effect against ageing -related deterioration on the human body. Caloric restriction in humans may reduce the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis.

Dr Xxxxx : Antioxidants:
Some theories of ageing such as the antioxidant theory, suggests that oxidant scores cumulative cellular damage. By limiting the action of oxidants we can prevent some of the damage and ageing.
Dr Xxxxx : I think there is no evidence that human beings actually oxidize. Oxidation is something which occurs to fats when exposed to oxygen or to bacterial contamination. Is not really a process that occurs inside the body?
Kinkajou : Nonetheless, many believe that antioxidants in the diet can make a substantial difference to longevity.

Suggested antioxidants include: vitamin C, vitamin E, Q 10, and chemicals such as carnosine, lipoic acid, and N-acetylcysteine. However studies have shown that some such antioxidants such as carotene and vitamin D in high doses actually increase mortality rates. So this theory may not be the final answer.

AntiOxidants prevent OxidationZ: metal plate with rust

 

Dr Xxxxx : Herbal Agents:
Resveratrol which is a derivative of red wine has been suggested as possible extending life. However research results are unclear. Research has suggested that perhaps Resveratrol may only be effective in increasing lifespans in fat mice, with original research occurred.
Many common traditional herbs are also purported to increase lifespan. Pterostilbene, a substance, found in blueberries, has also been suggested as possibly extending life.

Dr Xxxxx :  Other herbal agents include:
a Chinese tea called Jiaogulan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum), dubbed "China's Immortality Herb." 
Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, describes a class of longevity herbs called rasayanas, including 

• Bacopa monnieri, 
• Ocimum sanctum, 
• Curcuma longa, 
• Centella asiatica, 
• Phyllanthus emblica, 
• Withania somnifera 

Dr Xxxxx :  Other herbal agents suggested by a number of pharmaceutical companies include:

Green Tea Extract
Pycnogenol
Ginkgo Biloba Extract
Echinacea Extract
Artichoke Leaf Extract

Vinpocetine
Butterbur-Ginger-Riboflavin European Milk Thistle
Ashwagandha Extract
Saffron with Satiereal

Rhodiola Extract (3% Rosavins)
Silymarin-Silibinins-Isosilybin A & B)
Huperzine A

 

Healthy Herbs

Dr Xxxxx : Genetic modification

There is some recognition that there is a genetic element to extend the lifespan. Currently we believe that lifespan is genetically determined. Research on worms and fruit flies has revealed that genetic manipulation can cause substantial increases in life expectancy. In case of nematode worms, we have shown that through genetic engineering we can increase lifespan by factor of 10 fold.

In mice, single gene manipulation has resulted in lifespan extensions of up to 150%.

Gene modification can also take the form of the use of drugs or DNA active agents being used interfere with the expression of proteins, to change gene expression or to alter cell replication counters as represented by the telomeres present on chromosomes. By altering the enzyme telomerase, the process of telomere shortening can be arrested.

 

Aging Effects on People

 

 

Dr Xxxxx : Medications
There have been some suggestions that rapamycin (now called sirolimus) which is an extract from a bacterium called Streptomyces hygroscopicus could be effective at extending life. It was initially discovered in the early 1980s by researcher called Suren Sehgal from beneath one of the East Island stone heads.
When his laboratory was closed down by Ayerst pharmaceuticals, Sehgal retained a vial of the bacterial culture and was able to convince the pharmaceutical company Wyeth who purchased Ayerst pharmaceuticals years later, to restart further research on this drug.

Rapamycin (now called sirolimus) possesses immuno-modulatory properties. Research suggested that this drug was able to reduce the immune response to transplanted organs. It also possessed some anti-cancer actions. Some research has suggested that the drug appears to delay “age-related decline” in multiple different organ systems. Scientists have discovered that the Rapamycin molecule inhibited the mTOR (mammalian target of Rapamycin) pathway.
It has been suggested that closing down the pathway switches the cell into a more conservative mode whereby it cleans itself up and recycles old proteins. It mimics the action of caloric restriction.

This action to reduce metabolism, is thought to be related to its action in reducing cancer cell growth.

Male mice on Rapamycin (now called sirolimus) lived 9 percent longer. The female mice’s life span was extended by 14 percent.

Rapamycin (now called sirolimus) has been found to reduce age-related bone loss, reverse cardiac aging, and reduce chronic inflammation in mice. The Novartis study was the first to examine Rapamycin’s effect on aging-related parameters in healthy older people. “
The Novartis researchers tried to get around the immune-suppression side effect by giving the drug in very low doses and for a defined period. They found its benefits persisted long after the drug was discontinued.

CENSORED

Mice Life Extension Trial

Dr Xxxxx :  There is caution about the anti-aging potential of Rapamycin ; low-dose Rapamycin (now called sirolimus) will lengthen human life span. A favourable risk/benefit ratio needs to be demonstrated in clinic trials to be sure that mTOR inhibitors such as Rapamycin have acceptable safety and efficacy in aging-related conditions in humans.”

Dr Xxxxx : Other drugs have been suggested to have some effects on aging. Metformin extended the life of federally funded mice in a clinical trial. And there may be evidence that it might do the same for people. Diabetes typically shaves about five years off a person’s life. A large retrospective analysis found that diabetics on metformin had a 15 percent lower mortality rate than non-diabetic patients in the same doctors’ offices.

Dr Xxxxx :  Hormone treatments
Hormone therapies have been shown to improve the appearance of health. Low dose growth hormone supplements have been suggested to improve health by increasing muscle mass and muscle strength, effectively reversing some of the physical effects associated with ageing. There has been such some suggestion that growth hormone or IGF-1 signals may modulate the ageing process in humans.

Natural Oestrogen
Natural Oestrogen without Soy Isoflavones
DHEA (Dehydro-epiandrosterone)
Super Miraforte with Standardized Lignans
Pregnenolone
Triple Action Cruciferous Vegetable Extract with Resveratrol
Soy Isoflavones

Miracle Worker Cream + Renewed Hope Cream

 

 

Kinkajou : What are the current biological limits on our human life span, or our human "youth span," as you call it?
Erasmus : The Bible says three score and ten is the measure of our time on earth. Yet, in this time and age, people regularly attain their 90s, well and truly blitzing life span expectations. This could equate to and extra 10-20 years of life for every one if we could generalise the benefits.

No one could retire until their 80s if we managed that. There is a lot of angst in Australia as the government has been increasing retirement ages. Most people are living longer and the burden of providing for the aged is exceeding the capacity of the young to provide for them. Hence the government initiatives to delay retirement by increasing retirement age.

Bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another;

 

 

Easter Island Natives

 

 

 

Kinkajou : Well what are the “Proposed Strategies of Life Extension?”
Erasmus : Nanotechnology
Futures have suggested that the machines introduced body may be able to undertake repair processes including within cells. By stopping degeneration and wear and tear cell life and hence the life of the human body could be extended.

Kinkajou : Stem cell therapy, Cloning and body part replacement?
Erasmus : This has also been suggested as a possible method of prolonging human life. Currently there’s been no research finding suggesting that these methods may be effective. Most research is focused on repairing injuries such as spinal cord injuries not at extending life.

DR Xxxxx: What about Paill?

Erasmus : (Censored.by order of “Frobisher” authorised by “The Commandant”.)

RoboCop Cyborg

 

Kinkajou : what about the Cyborgs?
Erasmus : Others have suggested that a better process may well be to meld human bodies with mechanical elements, in effect creating the cyborg. By replacing defective parts of the human body with more wear and tear resistance mechanical equipment, the human body may effect be prevented from wearing out.
Currently the use of mechanical implanted in human body is used to minimise the effects of ageing and “wear and tear” there is however no reason to believe that such a path would lead to extended life.
Kinkajou: many people have talked about freezing i.e. the science of Cryonics. What you think of this one?
Erasmus : Cryonics suggests that the body can be stored at low temperatures after death. By preserving the body now, it is able to survive into a future advanced medical technologies may allow the deceased, chronic frozen person to be resuscitated, and their damaged body to be repaired.

I think most people seem to forget that freezing is bad for the body. I have seen a large number of coronary artery bypass graft patients (CABG). The mental state is not quite right for a number of years after the process. It appears that the cooling of the brain causes some acceleration and damage to the structure and function of the brain.

People routinely report poor memory and loved ones commonly report changes in the mental state of the patient. Increased anger and aggression, common sides of frontal lobe brain damage are frequently reported.

I think that even cooling brains , but not freezing them is a really bad idea. Freezing is worse because the microcrystals generated by the freezing process to the cells apart and damage to cellular structure. It is quite possible that you could resuscitating one and in the distant future find that every single cell in the body is torn open and broken. Unless you have a capacity to prepare severe damage a massive scale, it’s unlikely that the person will be resuscitated. I would expect that cooling causes cell protein and cell structural alterations which damage system functions for long periods of time.

Proponents argue that even at room temperature cells take many hours to die. However neurological damage occurs within three minutes of cessation of oxygen flow. Rapid freezing may limit the formation of ice crystals and their size, but is unlikely to stop this process. Imagine waking up in the cryonic future to be told that things would be better if only that put in some cellular antifreeze before freezing that person.

Even if there is something a proposal, the process to be successful is quite likely to be much more complex than we currently believe. And in the long run any damage even if small may be unacceptable as it changes who we are, through our mental state.

It has been suggested that people have been resuscitated after having undergone a cold drowning process. People have survived for up to an hour without heartbeat after submersion in ice cold water. Full recovery has been reported to occur. However, who was monitoring the patient’s mental functions long-term. Just because they walk and talk, does not mean they are who they were.

The only human tissues routinely cryopreserved and brought back to life are frozen human embryos. There has been no suggestion that it is possible to cryopreserve and resuscitating more advanced human structures.

 

 

 

 

Kinkajou : Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)?
Erasmus : This strategy is actually a combination of many of the previous proposed strategies. The SNS strategy proposes that rejuvenation can be obtained by removing ageing damage.

Proposed mechanisms are stem cells, removal of lengthened telomeres, alteration of mitochondrial protein expression, use of lysosomal hydrolases, and improved immuno-competence. Molecular repair and organ replacement have also been included in the strategy.

Bible On Ageing

Kinkajou : Fooling genes?
Erasmus : The premise of this concept of ageing is that as a body is aged, specific ageing genes activate throughout life. If we were able to fool the genes within the body into thinking that the body is young, life could be extended. The Prince of lethal genes and body which may activate later in life forms part of the basis of this theory.
I think any cell which activates a lethal gene will probably die. Its role will be taken up by other cells that have not activated lethal genes. It would appear that the role of lethal genes and extending life may be quite limited.

Is there a possibility of identifying changes within the internal environment of the body which create the process of ageing? Perhaps!
Can reversing these changes lead to extending life? Perhaps!
It remains to be seen whether this approach can generate any traction.
Reversal of informational entropy

Some authors suggest that the body ages because its information handling capacity reduces over time. The suggestion is that by addressing fitness and increasing information load through the neural system the body, some effects of ageing such as senescence can be reversed.

Fooling Genes
Kinkajou : Mind uploading?
Erasmus : Science fiction writers love this one. However, we do understand memory or consciousness. Generating a consciousness is likely to be extremely complex event. We are unlikely ever to be able to access sufficient information on the state of the brain to ever be able to create a “mind”.

Kinkajou : What is Anti-Aging Medicine?
Erasmus :Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health have found that the anti-aging lifestyle can add 24.6 more years of productive lifespan if people are availing themselves of the armament of state-of-the-art biomedical technologies in advanced preventive care, including preventive screenings, early disease detection, aggressive intervention, and optimal nutrition - all of which are cornerstones of the anti-aging medical model. 

The researchers found that the most important predictors of excellent health over the entire decade were:

• Absence of chronic illness
• Income over US $30,000
• Having never smoked
• Drinking alcohol in moderation
• Maintaining a positive outlook
• Managing stress levels

Around the world, people are seeking medical guidance for ways to stay healthy, active, and vital well into their older years. As a result, the principles of the anti-aging lifestyle are gaining rapid and widespread acceptance as a framework for lifelong habits for healthy living.

 

Youth To Age A Progression

 

 

Kinkajou : I think the general public may have some reservations about life extension.
Erasmus :Yes I can see a number of problems.

• There are many fears about population.
  
  
• Economically and industrially, we may forward to support a longer the population.
• Currently life extension is still not likely to extend a women’s childbearing years. If people delay having children due to expectation of a longer life, they may not be able to have any children at all.
  
  
• Many people worry about long life but poor health. The ideal expectation is for long life and good health, but this is not guaranteed.
• Life extension may well change the flux of employment and of ideas within our culture. It may alter the ability of our society to cope with rapid change in ideas, technology and lifestyle.
  
  
• Stockholm syndrome when it comes to aging. The idea being that because aging has always been an insurmountable obstacle for humanity, that we have dignified it more than it deserves, that we contort ourselves logically and rhetorically to defend it precisely because it is so inescapable.
• It's probably true that if people in the first world were, through some sort of medical intervention, able to live to be 200 years old and people in Bangladesh were still dying at a relatively young age, that would tend to widen the distance in personal wealth. 

Kinkajou : Any other good example existing in nature for life extension?
Erasmus : Ageing is a biologically complex phenomenon. It is likely to encompass dozens of different processes.
Erasmus : it is unlikely that any one technique will significantly extend lives. I think the best we can hope for is as our knowledge grows, each new technique giving us incremental gains. Cancer is a good example of the process of incremental gains. 50 years ago the chances of surviving any cancers were poor.

However, substantial gains have been made in many areas over the last few decades. Many advances simply show the new drug maybe 10% to 20% more effective than the previous drug. However, this process is ongoing. To the world we live in now is substantially different to the one existing five decades ago. But the process of reaching the world today has been the process of incremental gain over the world of yesterday. Perhaps there are no miracle cures.
Erasmus : The only way that a miracle cure may eventuate through the process of paradigm shift. If our understanding of the world we live in changes fundamentally, we may make substantial advances. The era of the computer encompassing transistor, memory and integrated circuits came about from a paradigm shift in our ability to simulate valved diodes and valved transistors. Perhaps biology will give us a similar example.

Kinkajou : represents a significant large field in which to make discoveries. By identifying the mechanisms of ageing, we may be able to develop drugs which target those mechanisms. We may be able to reduce the development of illness by method indirectly related to the illness itself.

There are many barriers to our development of drugs to treat ageing. Ageing is not considered to be a disease. Any new drugs must meet high safety standards, as they are being used to treat effectively healthy people without an illness. Even minor side effects we are unlikely to be acceptable.

I think this comes back to our one of our original statements. We’re not very good at proposing treatments that make you feel like shit, but are good for you. Our understanding of genetics and biology is at an embryological stage. Consequently, there are many things we are unlikely to be able to do.

Even if we cannot control ageing, the ability to restore cartilage in ageing joints, or reverse the loss of hearing (by stopping degeneration of hair cells in the inner ear) are cases that come to mind. The world is a complex place. Perhaps to go forward when it takes step back.

Bible Survey

Kinkajou : I like a comment I heard about long life. This comment argues that as long as life is worth living, according to the person him or herself, we have a powerful moral imperative to save or extend life, and to offer life extension therapies to those who want them.

Erasmus : I think the time has not come yet to allow us to research life extension therapies. There are powerful forces at play that limit our life span. Currently, I believe in advance in one area simply accelerates decaying decrepitude in another. Until we can understand better the world we live in and the nature with which we live, we are unlikely to find an unobstructed view of the effects of our intervention on health affecting the lifespan.

We can see the two steps forward, but often there will be associated two steps back which we cannot see. Only when we can understand what takes us back, can we really begin to plan what takes us forward.

Censored

Goo : There are many theories proposed to explain ageing. As usual the more series we have, the less understanding we possess.

Perhaps as Dr Xxxxx suggests a paradigm shift in our understanding of illness may help us to control ageing. Understanding genetics will be integral to our ability to address ageing.

Mitotic cells grow old and die. Meiotic cells live forever. Yet these are aspects of the same cell. This species lives on but the individual dies. But the above example suggests that there are powerful forces at play in creating this scenario. So perhaps it is a scenario we can change.

Delaying ageing and extending life have long been goals of humanity. Consequently I think this goal is attainable, because it is something to which people are prepared to devote both time and money. There are few social impediments to people seeking longer life.

People seek this every day today, though with greater or lesser success.
As usual, before we can make gains, we must develop at least enough understanding to make measurements. Then we can address specific facets of understanding, measure their effect and work towards a gain. There appear to be fewer impediments to humanity seeking to extend life than there are too many of our proposals for new tech for the future.
Erasmus : Remember the predictions of Nostradamus. A human population explosion within the next thirty years. Let’s hope it’s not because we have succeeded in extending life.

Dr AXxxxx. So long fuckers! Die Soon!