Earlier this month, a new study in rejuvenation made the news. And the results are pretty exciting.
Participants in a study literally grew younger during the course of the trial.
They actually turned back the clock on time. Stay tuned to hear all about it.
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OK, this is pretty exciting. Let’s just jump right in.
On September 5th, word came down that a small study in California
had revealed evidence that for the first time in human history, 9 older gentlemen had actually grown younger…
had literally knocked time off of their biological clocks.
This is exciting news. And it holds great promise for those of use who refuse to age gracefully,
who don’t accept that growing old and dying is inevitable.
OK, so real quick, here’s the facts.
The study was called Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation,
or the TRIIM study.
It was headed up by Dr. Greg Fahy, and it ran from 2015 to 2017.
The study was jointly conducted by Intervene Immune and Stanford Medical Center,
and was approved by the FDA.
The results were officially published in Aging Cell, a journal of the Anatomical Society, on September 8, 2019.
Now, the purpose of the study was to provide evidence that it’s possible to regenerate the thymus gland and reverse thymic involution.
Now, you’re probably wondering, “What the hell is thymic involution?”
At age 10, the thymus begins to gradually shrink, losing it’s mass and replacing it with useless fat.
By age 25, it has already lost 30% of it’s mass, and by the time we reach age 60, over half.
Why’s this important? The thymus is a thumb-sized organ just above the sternum,
and this is where our immune cells are developed
and learn to tell the difference between what’s us and what’s foreign.
There’s evidence that this loss of functional thymic tissue is related to the decline in the immune system
that contributes so much to the growing mortality risk as we age.
This is a quote from the study:
"[t]hymic involution leads to the depletion of critical immune cell populations,
[...] and is linked to age‐related increases in cancer incidence, infectious disease, autoimmune conditions,
generalized inflammation, atherosclerosis, and all‐cause mortality."
There’s a theory that the body doesn’t actually wear out with age.
Instead, aging is a movement of the timed growth and development of our bodies into a phase of late-life self-destruction.
Thymic involution is a part of this process, and reversing it might lead to a longer, healthier life.
Now, a number of studies conducted in the past have suggested that recombinant human growth hormone
might possibly regenerate the thymus and reverse thymic involution.
In fact, about 20 years ago, Dr. Fahy experimented on himself with growth hormone
and discovered evidence that he was able to regenerate the thymus.
Ever since, he’s wanted to conduct a clinical trial to see if he could duplicate his results.
So, he and his team gathered 10 healthy, adult males between the ages of 51 and 65,
and they collected data on 9 of them.
During the first week of the trial, these men were given recombinant human growth hormone.
Since one of the primary risks of injecting growth hormone is an increased risk of diabetes,
the researchers gradually introduced some anti-diabetic drugs to the regimen.
These included the steroid hormone dehydroepiandrosterone, otherwise known as DHEA;
metformin, which is a type-2 diabetes drug that helps to increase insulin sensitivity, zinc and vitamin D.
The trial was concluded after 12 months of providing the study’s participants with this cocktail.
MRI scans were performed on the test subjects throughout the trial, and these scans told the story.
The researchers observed significant regeneration of functional thymic tissue,
replacing the fat which had previously made up most of the thymus gland.
The participant also showed signs of immune system rejuvenation.
Now, once the study was completed, kind of as an afterthought,
Dr. Fahy decided to check the drugs effect on the participant’s epigenitic clocks.
So, he approached Prof. Steve Horvath of UCLA, and asked him to conduct an analysis.
Epigenetic clocks are one way to measure a person’s biological age, in contrast with their actual chronological age.
They look at aging markers for methylation across a few hundred sites on the DNA.
There are several of these epigenetic clocks, but Prof. Horvath has developed the one that’s the most accurate,
and it’s the best available measure of life expectancy.
It’s called the Grim Age clock, but it also goes by the Horvath Clock.
So, Prof. Horvath ran an analysis of the test subjects from samples collected at several stages throughout the trial.
At the start of the trial, because the subjects tended to be highly-motivated anti-aging enthusiasts,
the average epigenetic age of the group was already well below the average chronological age.
Now, the expectation was that at the end of the 12-month trial,
one extra year would be added to the methylation ages of each participant.
But that’s not what he found.
Instead, Prof. Horvath found that on average,
each participant had actually rolled back ltheir epigenetic clocks, by a year and a half.
Since the study lasted for one year, this means each participant had effectively lost 2.5 years in age.
They’d actually turned back the clock on aging.
Additionally, for most of them, they had the biggest loss in the last 3 months of the study.
This raised the possibility that there might be a latency issue here…
that it takes a while for the drugs to kick in, or that the effects might somehow be cumulative.
Which in itself raises the possibility that a longer trial might produce an even bigger drop in epigenetic age.
Finally, some of the participants got tested again at 18 months, 6 months after the trial had ended.
And they found that the results held firm, no one had regressed.
The subjects were still testing about 2.5 years younger.
Now, a word of caution here.
The researchers have suggested being cautious about these results
because it was a very small test group, and there was no control group.
Hopefully, in the future, there will be more comprehensive tests.
As far as I know, this is the first time that the ability to reverse biological aging has been demonstrated in humans.
That it’s possible to literally grow younger, to actually turned back the clock on aging,
This is pretty exciting.
Leave me a comment and tell me what you think about this news.
About the results of this study, and the impact that they have on aging.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll catch you next week.