Yes, why aren’t they working on a new video game, instead!? /s
There are a lot of different medical issuers that affect people in various way. some are more impactful than others, but it makes no sense to put all resources on a single, most impactful problem. Better to put some resources on a variety of problems. Cancer research is still going to get a lot more resources than this.
I think this is an appropriate use of resources. Fixing motility of stem cells in this case may reverse grey hair but improving the motility of other stem cells may have other health, immune and age related benefits. It is entirely possible this is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak. I just wish we could find non-RX methods to do these things.
Can you believe the budget for Fast and Furious 10 is $340 million?
Here comes the classic …“Oh wait”, … someone is once again complaining because we are spending money on “superficial” healthcare (e.g. hair loss, grey hair, aging etc)
Spending money to better understand the human body is valuable. Sure, I wish people would wake up and demand that we cure cancer(s), Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc. In lieu of that, we should be happy that money is funneled into “healthcare” to solve any problems.
Btw, interest on the US debt will soon be over $1 trillion a year.
> interest on the US debt will soon be over $1 trillion a year
And that trillion dollars gets, what, flushed down the toilet? No, it goes into the hands of bond-holders, who spend it the same way they spend the rest of their money, including on plucking hairs out of mice to study aging. (Obviously I mostly agree with you here, just nitpicking the idea that that trillion dollars is "wasted" somehow.)
> That doesn’t sound like an efficient use of capital.
It is literally 100% efficient. There is no source of inefficiency. The reason is because that's not where the "use" is. Look for inefficient actual "uses" of government money (there's a lot), and argue against those. Interest is not waste; the capital doesn't go away. It just changes hands.
Did any of the hyped anti-aging things pan out / show reproducible effect? Specifically the telomere research, blood transfusions, and extensive fasting?
Was low-calorie diet -> lower mortality ever proven when accounting for likely resulting lower muscle mass/fitness?
Typically in mice. Testing in humans takes a very long time and has ethical concerns so if you wait until it gets "proven" to trust anything you'll be long dead already.
low calorie stuff is very difficult to get right. You are more likely to mess up and actually reduce your lifespan while also living worse quality of life (weaker, low energy, low endurance). No way around it, the body needs fuel to build cells and produce energy.
Eating normal and exercising regularly to maintain muscle mass will reduce chances of all cause mortality and delay morbidity for as long as possible, however you must also maintain creatine supplementation well into old age to support the muscles and brain. The effects of creatine on the brain are often understated but they are significant.
This 'stuck' notion tracks with my anecdata, as I once noticed one of my own hairs switch back from gray to colored. ... Alas, its comrades did not follow its lead.
Same. I've noticed a few times where a solid strand of my hair suddenly turned into a curious grey/white colour, with perhaps a bit of a reddish interval inbetween, then after some length turns back into the original colour...
And once it didn't turn all the way, but it got stuck on a curious reddish-yellow colour, then reverted.
> In the latest experiments in mice whose hair was physically aged by plucking and forced regrowth
...
edit:
The researchers in this case decided to pluck hairs from young mice repeatedly until it started growing in grey instead of just looking at grey hairs on older lab mice.
I think with animal research there needs to be a careful balance struck between the amount of pain/harm caused to the animal and the potential good that can come from the research. Like, in animal studies that are done to try to prevent future cancer deaths, purposefully inducing cancer in lab rats is defensible.
In this case, without looking at the research paper to get more details, it sounds like they basically tortured live lab mice without a defensible reason, due to the fact that alternative methods were available.
Their methodology also makes the results less useful for the thing they were trying to research. Instead of knowing that stem cells exist but get stuck in older mammals who go grey, we instead know that if you repeatedly pluck out your own hair while you're young and then you go grey where you plucked out your hair, it's likely due to stem cells getting stuck.
This article gives me an opportunity to share a story that I’ve shared with my kids though I don’t think they believe me.
When I was a teen I heard my dad say that my uncle (his older brother) would make a habit of advice that he liked, and then keep the habit forever. For example, a long time ago someone had advised him to massage his scalp daily for healthy hair. He was in his 70s at that point and had far less grey than my much younger dad.
So, around that time I started to vigorously massage my scalp every day while taking a shower. I spend about 15-20 seconds doing so.
My uncle passed away in his mid eighties with far less grey than is normal at that age.
I’m now approaching my mid fifties with only a handful of grey and keep on getting “you don’t look your age” comments.
> I don't think working out increases testosterone
You think wrongly, they're definitely linked:
"Exercise: Resistance training increases testosterone levels acutely, however, in older men, that increase can be avoided by protein ingestion. Endurance training in men may lead to lower testosterone levels." [0]
It's an interesting question, I'm not sure. This is mentioned under the Health Risks section though:
"In people who have undergone testosterone deprivation therapy, testosterone increases beyond the castrate level have been shown to increase the rate of spread of an existing prostate cancer."
So there's probably myriad scenarios where one needs to balance testosterone levels with maintaining physical activity/strength training.
One rabbit hole to go into for this topic is Diindoylymethane a.k.a. DIM which is a Indole-3-carbinol but there are caveats that vary by person, dietary intake, environmental intakes, genetics, etc... It affects how much testosterone and estrogen are converted into their less potent forms but it's tricky because it would have to be measured in the blood serum first to avoid taking too much, otherwise the conversion inverts and/or other weird things start to happen.
Hard to refute -- I use a pretty vigorous spin-brush-dryer on my hair every day for ~5 minutes, which only does the top and front. I just noticed recently that the sides have grown out beyond a few mm, and they are much grayer than the top.
There is a subreddit dedicated to hair loss and techniques. I think one of the highly rated posts discusses use of weekly dermarolling, massaging the scalp, in combination with the regular things like finasteride, minoxidil, and ketoconazole shampoo. Anyways, this isn't exactly science. I think one mode of action to explore is increased blood flow helping with hair growth.
We know massaging an area increases blood flow to that area, in turn promoting better cellular metabolic processes. Dermarolling seems to do this through inflicted trauma/irritation to said area. I know one of the actions of minoxidil is a vasodilator.
Checks out. Worst case you just have really clean hair and developed a new daily mindfulness technique.
Oh wow. My father went bald. As a teenager i didnt want that to happen so to my stupid teenage mind it made sense to vigorously massage my head when I washed my hair. It is still lush at 54.
Pretty sure it was just genetics, but i still do the same thing 40 years later and now I am afraid to stop.
“Ito says the team has plans to investigate means of restoring motility of McSCs or of physically moving them back to their germ compartment, where they can produce pigment.”
Sharpen your machetes, tape up your baseball bat handles, time for the zombies.
Quercetin/Zinc complex and stem cells: A new drug therapy to ameliorate glycometabolic control and pulmonary dysfunction in diabetes mellitus: Structural characterization and genetic studies
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
For gray hair specifically, zinc might do more harm than good: low Copper levels are associated with gray hair and Zinc reduces Copper absorption to the point that it can make you Copper deficient.
Copper increases melanin and collagen production in the body.
Anybody knows a link between stem cell maturation and emotional shock ? a good 10% of my hair became white after some event. I'm very surprised about the overnight change and the fact that they're not replaced.
Once there was this kid who got into an accident and couldn't come to school, but when he finally came back his hair had turned from black into bright white. He said that it was from when the cars had smashed so hard.
When I was a kid our poodle got heartworms. They shaved the side of her and applied some type of salve there in addition to shots and/or pills. That spot on her stayed pretty much jet black while the rest of her turned grey until she died at 18.
66 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadThere are a lot of different medical issuers that affect people in various way. some are more impactful than others, but it makes no sense to put all resources on a single, most impactful problem. Better to put some resources on a variety of problems. Cancer research is still going to get a lot more resources than this.
Here comes the classic …“Oh wait”, … someone is once again complaining because we are spending money on “superficial” healthcare (e.g. hair loss, grey hair, aging etc)
Spending money to better understand the human body is valuable. Sure, I wish people would wake up and demand that we cure cancer(s), Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc. In lieu of that, we should be happy that money is funneled into “healthcare” to solve any problems.
Btw, interest on the US debt will soon be over $1 trillion a year.
And that trillion dollars gets, what, flushed down the toilet? No, it goes into the hands of bond-holders, who spend it the same way they spend the rest of their money, including on plucking hairs out of mice to study aging. (Obviously I mostly agree with you here, just nitpicking the idea that that trillion dollars is "wasted" somehow.)
It is literally 100% efficient. There is no source of inefficiency. The reason is because that's not where the "use" is. Look for inefficient actual "uses" of government money (there's a lot), and argue against those. Interest is not waste; the capital doesn't go away. It just changes hands.
Was low-calorie diet -> lower mortality ever proven when accounting for likely resulting lower muscle mass/fitness?
Eating normal and exercising regularly to maintain muscle mass will reduce chances of all cause mortality and delay morbidity for as long as possible, however you must also maintain creatine supplementation well into old age to support the muscles and brain. The effects of creatine on the brain are often understated but they are significant.
Considering "normal" these days is metabolic syndrome, this doesn't even pass the smell test.
And once it didn't turn all the way, but it got stuck on a curious reddish-yellow colour, then reverted.
...
edit:
The researchers in this case decided to pluck hairs from young mice repeatedly until it started growing in grey instead of just looking at grey hairs on older lab mice.
I think with animal research there needs to be a careful balance struck between the amount of pain/harm caused to the animal and the potential good that can come from the research. Like, in animal studies that are done to try to prevent future cancer deaths, purposefully inducing cancer in lab rats is defensible.
In this case, without looking at the research paper to get more details, it sounds like they basically tortured live lab mice without a defensible reason, due to the fact that alternative methods were available.
Their methodology also makes the results less useful for the thing they were trying to research. Instead of knowing that stem cells exist but get stuck in older mammals who go grey, we instead know that if you repeatedly pluck out your own hair while you're young and then you go grey where you plucked out your hair, it's likely due to stem cells getting stuck.
When I was a teen I heard my dad say that my uncle (his older brother) would make a habit of advice that he liked, and then keep the habit forever. For example, a long time ago someone had advised him to massage his scalp daily for healthy hair. He was in his 70s at that point and had far less grey than my much younger dad.
So, around that time I started to vigorously massage my scalp every day while taking a shower. I spend about 15-20 seconds doing so.
My uncle passed away in his mid eighties with far less grey than is normal at that age.
I’m now approaching my mid fifties with only a handful of grey and keep on getting “you don’t look your age” comments.
It may be genes or it may be this practice.
You think wrongly, they're definitely linked:
"Exercise: Resistance training increases testosterone levels acutely, however, in older men, that increase can be avoided by protein ingestion. Endurance training in men may lead to lower testosterone levels." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Regulation
Why on earth would you want to avoid it? That's like saying weight loss could be avoided by eating lots of cake.
"In people who have undergone testosterone deprivation therapy, testosterone increases beyond the castrate level have been shown to increase the rate of spread of an existing prostate cancer."
So there's probably myriad scenarios where one needs to balance testosterone levels with maintaining physical activity/strength training.
We know massaging an area increases blood flow to that area, in turn promoting better cellular metabolic processes. Dermarolling seems to do this through inflicted trauma/irritation to said area. I know one of the actions of minoxidil is a vasodilator.
Checks out. Worst case you just have really clean hair and developed a new daily mindfulness technique.
Pretty sure it was just genetics, but i still do the same thing 40 years later and now I am afraid to stop.
Sharpen your machetes, tape up your baseball bat handles, time for the zombies.
Got into an accident and couldn't come to school
But when he finally came back
His hair had turned from black into bright white
He said that it was from when
The cars had smashed so hard
Zinc Promotes Adipose-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cell Proliferation and Differentiation towards a Neuronal Fate https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932442/
Quercetin/Zinc complex and stem cells: A new drug therapy to ameliorate glycometabolic control and pulmonary dysfunction in diabetes mellitus: Structural characterization and genetic studies https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Copper increases melanin and collagen production in the body.
ps: timeless intro
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-str...