The study in which they reverse aging in mice was carried out by molecular biologist David Sinclair and experts at Harvard. Author: CNN
WASHINGTON, January 13th. In labs in Boston, USA, old and blind mice regained their sight, developed smarter and younger brains, and developed healthier muscle and kidney tissue.
Such experiments show that aging is a reversible process, capable of moving back and forth at will, said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School’s Blavatnik Institute and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center. Research in the biology of aging.
Our bodies hold a kind of backup of our youth that can be activated to regenerate, says Sinclair, lead author of the new study and research in laboratories in collaboration with international scientists.
Several combined experiments published in the academic journal Cell challenge the scientific notion that aging is the result of genetic mutations that undermine our DNA, creating a reservoir of damaged cellular tissue that can lead to decay, disease and death.
It’s not junk food, we think it’s a loss of information, a loss of the cell’s ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function, how you can screw up the software on the computer. “I call it the information theory of aging,” Sinclair said.
Jae-Hyun Yang, a genetics researcher at the Sinclair Lab and co-author of the study, hopes the new findings will change how we think about aging and how we treat comorbidities. Epigenetic changes control aging. If we think of DNA as the body’s hardware, the epigenome will be the software, he said.
According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, epigenomes are proteins and chemicals that sit like freckles on each gene, waiting to tell it what to do, where to do it, and when to do it. The surprising discovery is that the body has backup software that can be reset, Sinclair points out. “We are demonstrating why this software gets corrupted and how we can reboot the system using the reset switch,” he confirmed.
According to Sinclair, it doesn’t matter if you’re 50 or 75, the body is healthy or sick. Once this process is started, the body will remember how to regenerate itself and become young again. Now, at this point, we don’t know what the software is, we just know that we can flip a switch, he explained.
Sinclair Lab geneticist Yuancheng Lu created a mixture of so-called Yamanaka factors, adult human skin cells that have been reprogrammed to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells. The cocktail was injected into damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the eye of blind mice and activated by feeding them antibiotics. The mice regained most of their vision. Harmful factors can change the human epigenome, healthy behavior can restore it, warns
Sinclair.
We should focus on plant foods, eat less, get enough sleep, hold our breath for 10 minutes three times a week, exercise to maintain muscle mass, not worry about the little things and have a good social environment, the scientist advises. Our message is that every day matters,” Sinclair said.
Source: Juventud Rebelde