OK, today I’m really excited because I’ve got a great video for you guys, and it’s been a long time in the making.
It’s a about a molecule, a protein molecule, that might have a huge capacity to rejuvenate aging tissue.
This molecule already exists in our bodies, but it might be something that you’ve never heard of.
GDF11
If you watch this video and you’re gonna learn all about it.
This is something that I’m really excited about.
GDF11 might actually be able to move the needle on rejuvenation.
And not just move it a little, GDF11 might be able to move it a lot.
And it might make a big difference in restoring and rejuvenating aging tissues.
We’re gonna be looking at what GDF11 is and how it works.
We’ll examine some of the claims that have been made regarding the potential benefits of GDF11 on aging,
and we’ll talk about some of the controversial research that’s been done on GDF11.
And finally we’ll take a look a one citizen scientist and some of his amazing research and experiments
into aging and longevity with GDF11.
Now, I gotta admit, this is one of the longest videos that I’ve ever done.
But if you hang in there until the very end, I promise you that there is a ton of great information in this video.
OK, let’s start of this discussion by talking about what GDF11 is.
GDF11 is a protein and it stands for Growth Differentiation Factor 11,
so GDF11 is a growth factor.
GDF11 is also known as Bone Morphogenic Protein 11, or BMP-11, and it’s encoded by the GDF11 gene.
It acts as a cytokine, which is a loose category of small peptides that are important in cell signaling.
GDF11 is very similar in structure to myostatin, also known as GDF8,
and it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between the two in the lab,
as you’ll see when we get into some of the controversy caused by various studies on GDF11.
Now, growth, as it relates to the cells, can be anything from growing new muscle tissue to cellular repair.
And growth is regulated & coordinated by communication between the cells,
which takes the form of chemical signaling, also known as Intracellular communication…
and the loss of intracellular communication is one of the hallmarks of aging.
Growth factors are signaling peptide molecules that can either positively or negatively regulate
the proliferation, differentiation, migration and the very survival of cells and tissue.
They’re kinda like hormones because they circulate through the blood and are carried to their target cells or tissues.
However, hormones can only be secreted by specific glandular tissue,
whereas growth factors can be produced by every cell in the body.
There’s a lot of different types of growth factors, and they’re divided into several superfamilies.
Transforming growth factor β, also known as TGF-β, is one of the better known superfamilies, and GDF11 is a member of TGF-β.
One of GDF11’s primary functions is to activate the repair of DNA in stem cells.
Now, I’ve talked about the damage to the DNA of stem cells before and this is a big deal.
But it’s also crucial for regulating the network of blood vessels that provide your organs and tissues with a steady stream of healthy blood.
A study has shown that getting more blood to your organs could have a rejuvenating effect on a number of body systems.
So, a lot of studies have been conducted on GDF11 over the years,
and they have shown that GDF11 can have a huge impact on the aging process.
Or at least some of them have shown that.
Some of them have show just the opposite.
But more on that a little later.
Now, almost all of the these studies have been conducted on mice and rats, with only a few done on humans.
But the GDF11 in mice and rats is identical to the GDF11 found in humans,
and most of the human studies have backed up the findings in studies done on mice and rats.
Now, I’m not going to go into all of the beneficial effects of GDF11 on aging, because quit frankly, there are just too many.
I’m only going to cover what I consider to be some of the most important.
Systemic GDF11 treatment improves vasculature in the hippocampus and cortex of old mice
resulting in enhanced neurogenesis, while loss of GDF11 shortens telomere length by down-regulating telomerase activity.
Several studies have shown that GDF11 can improve the metabolism of glucose,
restore the insulin/IFG-1 signaling pathway and stimulate adiponectin secretion, potentially alleviating obesity,
hyperglycemia, insulin resistance and fatty liver development.
GDF11 enhances the therapeutic efficacy of mesenchymal stem cells in heart muscle.
This novel role of GDF11 may be used for a new approach of stem cell therapy in myocardial infarctions.
GDF11 improves endothelial dysfunction, decreases endothelial apoptosis,
and reduces inflammation, consequently decreasing atherosclerotic plaques.
GDF11 decreases liver fibrosis through expansion of liver progenitor cells, another type of stem cell.
The protective role of GDF11 during liver fibrosis suggests a potential application of GDF11
for the treatment of chronic liver disease.
Numerous studies have demonstrated GDF11’s considerable anti-aging effects on the skin.
It’s a regulator of skin biology, it can boost the production of procollagen 1 & hyaluronic acid,
and it can improve skin endothelial cells and skin vasculature.
GDF11 has been found to reduce oxidative stress and was able to reduce the levels of advanced glycation end-products,
protein oxidation and lipid peroxidation, and to slow down the accumulation of age-related histological markers.
And GDF11 can also cause a lowering of blood pressure, apparently because it can cause an increase in the expression of an enzyme
necessary for relaxation during diastolic functions.
Now, levels of systemic GDF11 normally decline with age.
In 2014, at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Richard Lee and Amy Wagers conducted experiments
where they grafted older mice to younger mice, so that both mice shared a single blood supply.
This is called heterochronic parabiosis,
and they found that they were able to reverse impairments to functionality and to restore the age-related damage to the DNA
in muscle stem cells, known as satellite cells.
This improved overall muscle structure and increased the capacity for both strength and endurance exercises.
In this same experiment, Lee and Wagers were also able to reverse cardiac hypertrophy.
You see, the heart gets bigger with age, succumbing to unhealthy hypertrophy.
But in the parabiosis experiment, the hearts of the older mice literally shrunk in size and came to resemble the hearts of the young mice.
In another study, researchers were able to recreate the rejuvenation effects of parabiosis in old mice
and reverse age-related hypertrophy, by simply restoring GDF11 to youthful levels using supplementation.
Wagers and Lee continued their research at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute,
finding that GDF11 is also capable of restoring muscle cell activity and enhancing muscle regeneration following damage.
That means that GDF11 can help reverse sarcopenia.
At the same time as the experiments with Wagers and Lee in 2014,
another study found that GDF11 can reverse the aging process in the brain.
When it was injected into older mice, their brain stem cells increased in number.
New blood vessels emerged, and the improved cerebral blood flow increased the animal’s cognitive abilities.
Not only did the mice get smarter, but their senses improved.
Once on supplemental GDF11, the elderly mice’s sense of smell was restored, back to a level that was comparable to young mice.
This means that GDF11 can potentially stimulate the growth of both nerves and blood vessels.
This opens the door to healing damage to the neurons, counteracting neurodegeneration, improving neural plasticity,
and maybe even treating mood and affective disorders.
Finally, in humans, even though levels of GDF11 go into decline as you age,
it’s been demonstrated that older males who’ve been active over the course of their lives show higher levels of GDF11
than in inactive older men.
So, as you age, your activity level can determine the levels of GDF11 present in your bloodstream.
These results, combined with the results that I mentioned previously, have led to claims that GDF11
may be a factor in longevity rejuvenation.
However, there’s some controversy surrounding these findings.
Another publication concluded that GDF11 actually increases with age and can have harmful effects on skeletal muscle regeneration.
However, in October of 2015, a Harvard study demonstrated that these contrary findings were the result of a flawed assay
that was detecting immunoglobulin and not GDF11.
The Harvard study claimed GDF11 does in fact reverse age-related cardiac hypertrophy.
However the Harvard study both ignored the GDF11-specific assay that was developed, establishing that GDF11 in mice is undetectable,
and that the factor measured was in fact myostatin, or GDF8.
GDF11 has also shown remarkable properties in the fight against cancer, although these findings are also controversial.
On the one hand, GDF11 has been found to have a therapeutic effect on various cancers.
Since it regulates the differentiation of stem cells, a key predictor of cancer progressions,
it may help to suppress growing tumors. In fact, some studies show that GDF11 can suppress tumors in both liver and pancreatic tissue
and that elevated GDF11 levels can promote apoptosis in pancreatic cancer cells.
However, in another study, 130 patients with colorectal cancer,
in which the expression of GDF11 was significantly higher compared with normal tissue,
they found a higher frequency of lymph node metastasis, more deaths and a lower survival rate.
This study suggests that GDF11 could be a prognostic biomarker in patients with this disease.
And according to the Human Protein Atlas database, GDF11 has been linked to breast, colorectal, liver, and pancreatic cancers.
Another area of controversy is bone formation.
I mentioned earlier that GDF11 is also known as BMP11, or Bone Morphogenic Protein 11,
and it plays an essential role in growing new bone material.
Here scientific research yields opposite conclusions.
On one hand, quite a lot of studies indicate that GDF11 plays a negative role.
In a study with mice in 2016, GDF11 was found to inhibit bone formation and hasten age related bone loss,
both for young adult and aged mice.
On the other hand, in 2015 another team of researchers took a look at the bone marrow of both ageing mice
and mice with osteoporosis and found that the concentrations of GDF11 were significantly decreased.
The scientists concluded that GDF11 is critical for bone homeostasis,
and even hypothesize that bone fragility may be reduced by GDF supplementation.
Suffice it to say that the research around GDF11 has been rife with controversy and this debate is still being waged,
with claims and counterclaims being fired back and forth by both sides.
So, here’s my read on this debate.
Because of flaws in the assay of GDF11 and in being able to distinguish between GDF11 and GDF8,
it’s unknown whether GDF11 can prevent cardiac hypertrophy, or cause it.
It’s still undetermined whether concentrations of GDF11 are higher or lower in various cancers,
and whether or not it causes or prevents osteoporosis.
But after looking at all the controversy, I feel that GDF11’s track record in repairing DNA damage to stem cells,
it’s effects on aging skin, and several other benefits are pretty much undisputed.
OK, so, in the face of all of this debate and controversy, one brave soul has decided to put it to the test…on himself.
And his name is Steve Perry.
This in NOT the lead singer for Journey. This is another Steve Perry.
For the last several years, Steve Perry has been conducting his own clinical trial on using supplemental GDF11.
I suppose that the term Clinical trial is a little inappropriate, because Steve is a citizen scientist.
He doesn't have his own clinic, he's not a medical doctor and he doesn't have a PhD.
None-the-less, he’s been conducting an on-going trial for several years now
and he’s recruited quite a few other biohackers and DIYers to join him.
And this group has shown some remarkable results and collected quite a trove of data.
Steve was convince by a lot of the studies that I’ve mentioned in this video,
but his rationale was also based on data coming back from organ transplants.
If you take an organ from an older person and give it to a younger patient, who obviously have a higher concentration of GDF11,
that older organ will usually become considerably rejuvenated over time.
And apparently, Steve thought GDF11 was the reason why.
So, Steve was patient Zero of GDF11 supplementation in humans.
Now, when Steve started out, there were no guidelines to go by, no blueprint on how to go about this.
So, it was trial-and-error for Steve.
Turns out, supplementing with GDF11 isn’t lethal, thank god, but if you don’t do it right, it can be uncomfortable.
If you do too much GDF11, you can get elevated blood pressure, shortness of breath,
insomnia, acid reflux, and in rare cases, heart arrhythmia.
By means of trial and error, Steve landed on the right protocol for supplementation.
After observing some remarkable positive changes, he decided to invite other longevity enthusiasts into the study.
He gathered a cohort of volunteers, who all took GDF11, tracked several different biomarkers
and logged their dosage and biomarkers every day.
So far, more than 100 people have decided to join the trial, and they have yielded a substantial amount of data.
And they found that they started to turn in results
that were mirroring the results of a lot of the mouse studies that I’ve already talked about.
They started experiencing improvements in their cardiovascular system.
They started putting on muscle. Their hearing, vision and sense of smell started to improve.
And their biomarkers improved as well.
Biomarkers for arterial elasticity went up by 64%.
For most of the participants, carotid artery thickness went down,
and one of the participants witnessed a reversal of his arterial plaque.
Heart rate variability improved on average by 22%, blood pressure was reduced by 5.7%,
and pulse rate was down by 6.3%.
Their skin got more elastic – improvements measured with a cutometer were up to 17.4%.
The participants reported feeling fitter, having greater endurance and more energy, and most of them also gained more lean muscle mass.
Their reaction time – something that normally declines with age – improved.
What’s more, it improved for all of the participants, with an average of 12.45%.
Same happened for other markers for breathing and the immune system.
Steve’s protocol is based on close observation of the feedback you get from your body.
If you choose to join their study, they send you a number of devices for tracking various biomarkers on a daily basis:
they send you an Emfit Sleep Tracking Monitor, a blood pressure and pulse monitor, a spirometer for measuring lung function,
a glucose monitor, a Camry Digital Hand Dynamometer for measuring grip strength,
a Bluetooth Body Fat scale & Body Composition Analyzer and a thermometer for measuring your waking body temperature.
They also provide a link for measuring your reaction time and another for downloading a phone app that measures your hearing.
They also provide a formula for diluting the GDF11 for injection.
Yes, the GDF11 has to be injected, it’s not available in oral form.
They also provide spreadsheets for tracking your biomarkers.
Now, if you want to join their study, it’ll cost you $15,000.
I know, that’s a bit steep.
But they’re very free with the information about how to conduct the study, and if you decide you want to try it on your own, you can.
All of the devices for tracking your biomarkers are readily available.
You can download both the dilution formula and the spreadsheets, even if you don’t officially join their study.
I corresponded with Steve and he didn’t recommend doing it on your own.
However, he did say that it can be done and he provided me with a source for the GDF11,
and I’ll put that source in the description.
I’ll also put a link to Steve’s website, where you can find a ton of information.
Now, they are also starting to combine the peptide Klotho with GDF11, and I’ll be doing another video shortly on Klotho.
Now, I’ll be honest with you. I can’t afford the $15,000 to join Steve’s study.
But I feel pretty confident that, with all of the information that he’s provided, I’m savvy enough to be able to do it anyway.
Now, I haven’t decided to it, yet. But if I do, I’ll let you guys know, and I’ll put up a video with my results.
And that’s it for me, and for this video. Thanks for hanging in there until the end.
I’m outta here, catch ya next time.