APOE4

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 […]

Changes in gene expression underlie aging and age-related diseases. There is all-but-universal (and equally unwarranted) assumption that both aging and age-related diseases are genetic. We see articles on “aging genes” and “genes that cause Alzheimer’s disease” (or genes that cause heart disease, osteoarthritis, etc.). The reality is that both aging and age-related diseases are not […]

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 […]

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 […]

We’re going to take an odd detour into both chaos theory and traffic flow in order to understand Alzheimer’s disease, so fasten your seatbelt. The key cascade of pathology that we’re going to look at (and explain) is the presence of beta amyloid plaques in patients with Alzheimer’s, but the principle applies equally to tau […]

Alzheimer’s disease steals our souls. We lose our humanity when it destroys the neurons that make up a critical part of our brains, but why those neurons die has always remained a mystery since “senility” was first noted, thousands of years ago. Even in the past century, since it was first described clinically by Dr. […]

Last weekend, a global entrepreneur asked me about the difference between much of the current research and what we’re doing. He cited the example of a particular compound (NAD+), but any number of other compounds could be given as examples. My answer was that most researchers are focused on their one particular tree and can’t […]

Last week I attended a global conference on aging research. The presentations were professional and thoughtful, as befits an organization of researchers with impeccable academic and clinical credentials. These are bright, well-educated people who work hard to understand not only the basic science that underlies aging, but the possible interventions that might cure age-related diseases. […]

Many of you have asked about Helen Blau’s work at Stanford, using telomerase mRNA [FASEB Journal]. Helen sent me a copy of her article when it came out and I’m a serious fan of her work. As some of you know from my upcoming book, The Telomerase Revolution, there are four approaches to resetting telomeres: […]