New, young blood can reverse some signs of aging, improve cognitive abilities

[Reefa]

Two separate research groups, publishing their results in Science and Nature Medicine today, found that transfusing young mouse blood into old mice can improve their cognitive and exercise capability, significantly reducing two major aspects of aging. When it comes to increasing human cognitive and physical performance and arresting the effects of aging, the researchers urge us to be cautious — but given how important blood is to human life, and all of the medical processes that already rely on blood transfusions, I wouldn’t be surprised if transfusing young blood into old people turns out to be the key to immortality. Maybe vampires were right all along. Well, kind of: Drinking the blood of the young and innocent probably won’t do much, buttransfusing it may actually improve your strength and intelligence.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and in this case, we have two reports backing up these claims, both from highly credible sources. The first, from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford, found that “young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice” [doi:10.1038/nm.3569]. The second study, this time from Harvard on the east coast, found that young mouse blood — which has high levels of a protein called GDF11 — improved cognitive and physical capabilities of older mice (which don’t have high levels of GDF11 in their blood).

While both studies showed sensational restorative effects, the most striking thing for me is how simple the UCSF/Stanford approach was. They took some young mouse blood, spun it in a centrifuge to create blood plasma (basically white gooey stuff that contains all of the good proteins but none of the blood cells), and then injected it into an old mouse. That was all it took to improve the old mouse’s learning and memory. (In scientific terms, the process essentially restored the mouse’s hippocampus to a younger, more plastic state. This is particularly exciting because the human hippocampus is very important for the creation of memories — when our hippocampus deteriorates, we get diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Speaking rather frankly, the senior author of the report, Stanford’s Tony Wyss-Coray, said: ”We really don’t know yet how this works.” Harvard doesn’t seem to be quite so nonplussed by its results: GDF11 appears to rejuvenate blood vessels in the brain, which get narrow and haggard as you get older — and increasing blood flow to the brain is a very, very good thing.

The big question now, of course, is whether these results will transfer over to humans. Given all the life-giving qualities of blood transfusions that we already know about, and the performance boosting effects of blood doping, it wouldn’t be surprising if blood also played a key role in reducing the effects of aging. After all, blood is the way that proteins and hormones get around the body — and most cells live and die based on the hormones and proteins that they receive. It stands to reason that if you switch in some new blood, the rest of your body would suddenly start behaving like it’s young again. A bit like changing the oil in your car.

For now, we only know that blood transfusions improve brain function. We have no idea how long the effects last, nor do we know whether these processes increase life span. If the price of immortality is the regular transfusion of blood harvested from children, then there could be some societal and ethical concerns. History is full of (in)famous types who believed that young blood was the key to immortality, from Pope Innocent VIII who hoped that the blood of 10-year-old boys would keep him from his deathbed, to vampires who feed off the “life energy” present in human blood. It was frowned upon back then, and it’d probably be frowned upon today.

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