300-year-old bloody ritual turned out to be an effective anti-aging remedy: scientists shared evidence

Scientists have found evidence that transfusions of young blood can slow down aging and improve health. So far, this has been experimentally proven with mice, but scientists are still not sure how it all works.

The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Nature Aging. Thus, as Invers writes, scientists have somehow managed to confirm the rejuvenation "procedures" practiced by the rich since the eighteenth century.

Researchers have long believed that young blood can have strong anti-aging properties. For the past 150 years, they have been trying to prove this through a surgical procedure called parabiosis. This procedure involves stitching together two animals (usually mice), which as a result of this operation receive a common circulatory system.

Studies conducted on mice have shown that transfusion of young blood makes the liver and heart of older mice stronger. In addition, the aging of the brain was slowed down.

A recent study conducted by scientists from Duke University found that parabiosis can slow down cellular aging and increase life expectancy by 10%.

"This is the first evidence that a process called heterochronic parabiosis can slow the rate of aging, which is accompanied by an increase in life expectancy and health," said James White, senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine and cell biology at Duke University School of Medicine.

Traditional parabiosis studies last for three weeks, but this time, the researchers wanted to get more data and see if the rejuvenation would last longer. Therefore, they conducted the test for 12 weeks and also complicated it by using very old and very young mice.

The study used four-month-old mice (equivalent to 20-30 years old in humans) and two-year-old mice (equivalent to 56-69 years old in humans). After a certain time, the mice were separated. Two months later, the researchers studied the organisms of the old mice to see what condition it was in.

It turned out that the genetic aging of blood and liver tissue had significantly decreased. The researchers also found that genes associated with lifespan extension were turned on, which are activated during interventions such as calorie restriction.

The procedure led to cell rejuvenation in the old mice, and their life expectancy increased by 10% compared to the control group of mice that had not been subjected to parabiosis.

Despite the successful study, White notes that this procedure is not ethical or practical for humans. It is also not known if the results of this study can be extrapolated to humans.

He acknowledged that scientists do not fully understand which molecules in young blood cause anti-aging effects.

"The elements that control this process are important, but they are not yet known. Are they proteins or metabolites? Are they new cells that the young mouse gives, or is the young mouse just buffering the old blood? This is what we hope to find out further," the scientist said.

Earlier, OBOZREVATEL told you about an eccentric 45-year-old millionaire entrepreneur from the United States, Brian Johnson, who was so eager to be young that he started transfusing blood from younger people. One of the donors was his 17-year-old son.

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