ARE VAMPIRES REAL Not the sparkling kind, but the drinking blood
to stay young forever kind?
Well science says maybe…
okay science doesn’t actually say that.
but science has started to notice that blood, specifically young blood might have rejuvenating
properties.
Which is just crazy interesting.
But exactly why that is, no one is certain.
Yet one new study points to a new, unknown molecule.
In this study published in Nature Communications, scientists found that young blood could heal
broken bones.
Alright so this gets a little..
um… gross.
but scientists conjoined the circulatory systems of pairs of mice in a process called parabiosis,
which means living besides.
Basically scientists stitch together the tissues of two mice, so an old mouse and a younger
mouse would share a blood supply.
I know, it totally seems like an antiue thing, and it’s kind of old.
Clive McCay of Cornell University first pioneered this technique in the 1950s.
but for some reason it’s experiencing a resurgence.
Yeah I know… a little too much like frankenstein.
But what’s interesting, besides the whole sewing together mice thing, is that the researchers
think this means that young blood cells secrete some molecule or protein that helps heal the
body.
And as an organism ages, they lose the ability to make this molecule.
Previously it was thought that GDF-11 a molecule that circulates throughout blood was the fountain
of youth.
But a recent study contradicts that finding.
This new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism found that as mice aged, the more
of this molecule circulated in the bloodstream.
And as researchers injected aging mice with this molecule, the worse their muscles repaired
themselves.
So who knows…
But even though scientists are still figuring that out, other studies show that there is
really something powerful about young blood.
Other studies like one published in the journal Nature Medicine found that young blood recharged
the brains of older mice.
Researchers ran mice through standard laboratory tests after they received an infusion of plasma
from young mice.
They did much better on the tests than older mice without young blood coursing through
their veins.
Curiously, that improvement was gone if the blood had been heated before hand.
Which again suggest there’s something going on with the proteins in young blood.
Because heat denatures protein, or basically when they get heated up, they lose their shape
and don’t work as well.
Kind of like ice cream melting on a summer day.
Other studies also showed how young blood pumps up older brains.
In one study published in the journal nature, after being exposed to young blood, the brains
of older mice looked more like that of a younger mouse.
Nerve cells in their hippocampi were better at forming connections, which is basically
what learning and memory is.
But wait there’s more.
In a similar Frankensteinian experiment, researchers stitched together older mice with a young
mouse.
They found that the young blood rejuvenated the hearts of the older mice.
The older mice suffered from cardiac hypertrophy, a condition which thickens and swells the
heart.
After four weeks of getting young blood from the other mouse, their hearts shrank to a
normal size!
All of these studies sure make you want to drink a nice tall glass of young blood eh?
Okay yeah, all these studies have been in mice, but researchers are already trying to
see what happens in humans.
In October of 2014 researchers at Stanford University gave transfusions of blood plasma
donated by people under 30 to older volunteers with mild to moderate Alzheimer's.
The results?
We don’t yet.
So maybe Dracula had it right all along, but I guess you could say…
more research is needed.