Sometimes, people laugh imagining themselves as elderly people. Would they laugh imagining themselves as diseased?

---

If you watched a TV show, or read a comic book, where the difficulties and suffering of an oncological patient were portrayed in a disrespectful, humorous way, you would likely be outraged; at the very least, you would think that the show or comic book was in seriously bad taste. You’d probably think the same about similar material involving a disabled person or anyone who, because of an incurable disease, had only a short time to live spent in increasing misery—for example, a child affected by progeria, a disease that may best be described as a sort of accelerated aging syndrome that kills off its victims in their mid-twenties at the very latest.

Yet, it is not uncommon to see the diseases of old age, and even elderly people in general, being laughed at in just such a way without causing much outrage at all. Why is there a difference?

We’ve all seen this

You can probably recall plenty of examples of this phenomenon from your own experience. Who has never seen a sketch where the main characters are exasperated by a shriveled, elderly man who, holding up an old-fashioned ear trumpet, keeps getting wrong what they are saying despite all their efforts? How many times have cheap laughs been gotten because of an elderly person losing his or her dentures or a rambling old man exaggeratedly ranting about pretty much everything?

Today, we have a new study showing that a common, plant-based compound could help clear out unwanted senescent cells, which accumulate with age and produce inflammatory signals that drive age-related disease progression.

Taking out the trash

A new study has investigated a natural, plant-based compound for its ability to destroy senescent cells [1]. These cells accumulate with age due to the aging immune system becoming increasingly poor at removing them; this leads to a build-up of these cells and the secretions they produce, which cause chronic inflammation. These proinflammatory secretions are known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).

CGP Grey has produced a new video, this time an animated version of Prof. Nick Bostrom’s “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant”. The fable is a powerful metaphor for aging and the acceptance mechanisms that have led humans to schedule their entire lives around its diktat.

---

There’s a good chance that ten or fifteen years from now, we’ll look back at this moment in history and realize that we were living through the beginning of a revolution, the first baby steps of what would eventually become a global movement. Maybe it’ll take longer, but just like it was for human flight, the unmistakable signs of the upcoming paradigm shift are all around us.

If you are paying attention to the field of rejuvenation biotechnology, you’re noticing how more and more experts have dared to “come out” and speak of aging not only as a medical problem to be solved but also one that we might just be able to relegate to medical history books in the relatively near term; you’re noticing the technical progress, big and small; how the topic is moving from fringe to mainstream; how more people join the cause; and how previously dismissive and uninterested people now react to this change, either by disputing the feasibility or desirability of defeating aging.

The enzyme holds clues to a possible cure for aging or potential cancer therapies.

Janet Iwasa

Nothing in your body lasts forever. Every single cell in your body will die eventually, and eventually you’ll run out of replacements. When that happens, various parts of your body will stop working correctly, and at some point the whole thing will shut down. Aging happens to all of us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Taking the supplement, dilation of subjects’ arteries improved by 42 percent, making their blood vessels, at least by that measure, look like those of someone 15 to 20 years younger. An improvement of that magnitude, if sustained, is associated with about a 13 percent reduction in heart disease, Rossman said. The study also showed that the improvement in dilation was due to a reduction in oxidative stress.

---

Older adults who take a novel antioxidant that specifically targets cellular powerhouses, or mitochondria, see age-related vascular changes reverse by the equivalent of 15 to 20 years within six weeks, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research.

The study, published this week in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting pharmaceutical-grade nutritional supplements, or nutraceuticals, could play an important role in preventing heart disease-the nation’s No. 1 killer. It also resurrects the notion that oral antioxidants, which have been broadly dismissed as ineffective in recent years, could reap measurable health benefits if properly targeted, the authors say.

“This is the first clinical trial to assess the impact of a mitochondrial-specific antioxidant on vascular function in humans,” said lead author Matthew Rossman, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of integrative physiology. “It suggests that therapies like this may hold real promise for reducing the risk of age-related cardiovascular disease.”