Can aging be reversed?

Recent developments in the longevity field suggests age reversal is fundamentally going to change everything. I will be writing series of articles on longevity & aging reversal. These are based on the book “LifeSpan” by David Sinclair — a renowned Genetics researcher at Harvard Medical School. We will be exploring only the physiological part of it leaving aside the psychological or economic aspects of longevity & age reversal.

What’s the core of this research?

Research in the longevity field across the world is proving aging is no more inevitable. We can precisely control aging, slow it down, speed it up as fast as we can and can reverse it too. To understand the aging behavior, scientists looked at other living things like mole-rats, yeast, pine trees. They tried to decipher the correlation across them to understand what’s making them live longer than their peers. Answer lies in longevity genes.

David Sinclair’s research for the past 20 years reveal that these same longevity genes that control aging works in worms, flies, mice, and humans. There are dismissive arguments that all these researches have been done only in mice, yeast and in a controlled lab environment. David Sinclair opines that core of all aging process is the same — whether it’s a mice or a human. If we can manipulate these longevity genes, we can reverse the aging process.

Why do we age?

Before we dive deeper, we need to understand few biological terms.

Some Definitions :

Cell — Cell is a microscopic bag of fluid filled with proteins and proteins are encoded by DNA which is in a part of a cell called Nucleus.

Nucleus — Nucleus is the brain of the cell. It contains cell’s hereditary information and controls the cell’s growth and reproduction. It contains the genetic information encoded in a 6 ft. long strand of a chemical called DNA.

DNA — It’s a long molecule that contains each person’s unique genetic code How does this 6 ft. long DNA gets packed inside a cell?. Wrapping happens though a protein called Histones.

Cassette Tape Analogy

Imagine this entire structure to a cassette tape. Based on the rotation of the tape, we hear particular part of the song. Magnetic tape is like the DNA. At any given point, only a certain type of information can be read. But if all of these information gets wrapped around and nothing gets opened up, there will be no action. Some part of the genetic information should be unraveled.

Why this unraveling is important?

When an egg is fertilized, how our body develops different body parts — Brain, Liver, Skin. is based on the cell type. This differentiation in the cell type is dependent on the wrapping of the DNA. This is how our brain cell must understand it has to be a brain for 100 years. If our brain cell loses that information on what genes to be read, and say it becomes a skin cell when you wake up, we will be dead.

How all this is related to aging process?

When this beautiful packaging of DNA unspools i.e. magnetic tape in the cassette is all over the place, instead of a specific code that needs to be read, cells now start reading extra information that’s floating around.

“Differentiation” is the terminology used to describe a cell becoming a certain cell type. When this unspooling happens and extra information is floating around, it’s called as “X-Differentiation”. X-Differentiation is the root cause of aging. It’s like our cassette tape failed to read the specific information. Instead, it’s the information which is all over the place.

We have brain cells called Neurons. When the DNA unspooling happens, other type of gene expression is read. It’s like liver cell information of a brain cell packaging is read. So when you become old, all these cell types start losing the information of their own type.

All these are different from the way how modern medicine works. We try to approach it in a disease specific way. We need different drugs for different diseases. But the process that is leading to all of these diseases is aging. Addressing the core of all — the aging process can slow down these diseases and can also reverse it by age reversal.

How to measure aging?

A research paper from Steve Horvath’s lab in 2013 found out the chemicals that control the bundling & spooling of gene information (assume regulator of the cassette tape ). If we can measure these, we can find out our biological age. Biological age is different from your chronological age which is just based on how many times earth has gone around the sun and it’s irrelevant.

And this biological age measuring chemical is called as “DNA Methylation”. DNA Methylation sticks to the DNA and in the womb, it dictates the pattern of which cell will become a brain cell and which will become a liver cell. But as we age, changes are observed in the DNA Methylation pattern. When we measure these patterns by taking out some sample from our skin cells, it reflects our actual biological age and can also predict our death. Measuring DNA Methylation pattern reveals our biological age.

With this Genome (Genetic information in an organism) reading, we can measure our biological age with accuracy. Based on my analysis, these tests are expensive, and the availability is limited in India. But in the near future, it will be available as a home kit and we can predict our biological age easily. It’s like having a biological credit score.

Age Reversal

What all of this means to us is that it’s not necessary that our age has to go up every year. All of the research so far has been done primarily in yeast and mice. Human trails have already started. Greg Fahy & other researchers identified 3 chemicals [ DHEA, Metformin , Growth Hormone ] which was used in a human trail treatment for aging reversal. When they measured the participant’s biological clock after a couple of treatments, it was observed that participants had become younger by 2.5 years. There are similar results observed in other experiments where people’s biological age was reversed by 20 years.

But the question still remains how many times these treatments can be taken, how healthier it is?, how cost effective it is?.

Aging is the fundamental layer above all of diseases like heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer. If we can address the regulators that causes aging, we can slow down these diseases and reverse aging. How do we do that ?. I will talk about what are these longevity genes, type of medical intervention, diet, supplements, exercises needed for enhancing longevity.