microglia

You might be intrigued by an invited paper this week in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, which the editors feel “will change the field”. The paper explains how Alzheimer’s works, why prior trials failed, and offers a novel point of intervention. The paper has already generated more than 100 reprint requests prior to publication. The link to […]

I confess that I’ve yet to find time to continue through each of several age-related diseases. In partial recompense, let me offer the following, which is adapted from the quarterly newsletter that I put out for Telocyte. While it focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, the import is generic, applying to all age-related diseases. How Alzheimer’s works […]

Aging causes disease. To many people, the relationship is even closer: aging is a disease. The latter view is controversial. Most biologists and physicians would view aging as a “natural process” and contend that “normal aging” is independent of disease. Aging, in this view is not a disease, although it certainly causes disease. They often […]

The human body represents a “system” in the engineering sense: all parts (cells, tissues, organs) are interdependent. To understand how the body functions (and how it ages), we may appropriately study individual cells, but we must also study the interactions between cells. We may start by looking at small communities of cells (local, homogenous tissues), […]

Why do some people age faster than others? We’ve all seen people – high school reunions come to mind – who have the same chronological age, but different biological ages: with the same “age”, one person looks ten years older (or younger) than another. If aging is related to cell senescence and cell senescence depends […]

Most of us – when we think of cells at all – seldom appreciate that the idea of a “cell” is a modern idea, not quite two centuries old. One of the tenets of cell theory is that cells are the “basic unit of life”. This makes some sense but note that while the components […]

Misconceptions regarding the current model of aging are rampant and they tend to fall into one of several categories. These include Straw man arguments, unfamiliarity with how age-related human pathology occurs, simplistic views cell senescence, genes, and expression, or misguided approaches to measuring telomeres (usually in the wrong cells). The Earth can’t possibly be round, […]

How does aging work? So far, in the prologue (section 0) and the section 1 posts, we have discussed a perspective, what aging isn’t (and is), and what we need to explain in any accurate model of aging. In this post, I provide an overview of how the aging process occurs, from cell division to […]

Aging and Disease 0.1 – A Prologue Over the past 20 years, I have published numerous articles, chapters, and books explaining how aging and age-related disease work, as well as the potential for intervention in both aging and age-related disease. The first of these publications was Reversing Human Aging (1996), followed by my articles in […]

About a century ago, in a small American town, the first automobile chugged to a stop in front of the general store, where a local man stared at the apparition in disbelief, then asked “where’s your horse?” A long explanation followed, involving internal combustion, pistons, gasoline, and driveshafts. The local listened politely but with growing […]

A physician friend asked if a patient’s APOE status (which alleles they carry, for example APOE4, APOE3, or APOE2) would effect how well they should respond to telomerase therapy. Ideally, it may not make much difference, except that the genes you carry (including the APOE genes and the alleles for each type of APOE gene, […]

Curing disease correlates with insight, not blind effort. There is an eternal trade-off between insight and effort. If we think carefully, understand the problem, and plan, then effort is minimized. If (as too often happens) we think carelessly, misunderstand the problem, and rely on hope instead of planning, then effort is not only maximized, but […]

It’s funny how often we make assumptions that are not only wrong, but that we are completely unaware of making. Having spent more than twenty years dealing with the clinical implications of cell aging, telomeres come to mind as an immediate example of this mistake. Hardly a week goes by without another claim that some […]