"Franken-mouse" Experiment May Hold Keys To The Fountain of Youth

I really wonder where some of these studies start.

Recently, scientists have discovered that injecting old mice with blood from young mice reverses some of the effects of the aging process.

"Old mice who were injected with the protein or who received a blood transfusion navigated mazes faster and ran longer on treadmills. They easily outperformed their control peers, who were given only saline."

The other side of that coin was the polar opposite scenario. Young mice injected with the blood of old mice showed signs of premature aging.

Beyond the obvious hopes and implications of these discoveries is the bizarre genesis of this experiment. Scientists first conjoined an older mouse with a younger mouse to study the effects of sharing a blood supply. Let me put that another way. Scientists stitched two mice together to see what would happen. Bueller? Bueller?

The Stanford scientists who conducted the "Franken-mouse" experiment said that the young mice used were the human equivalent of people in their 20's. I suppose they were able to make that assumption by observing the mice's poor taste in music, regrettable dating choices, and seemingly fearless approach to dangerous situations...like being stitched to another mouse.

I digress.

There are a multitude of systems within the human body which breakdown as a result of the aging process. Cognitive ability, organ function, stem-cell activity and the ability to fend off diseases are just a few of the questions to which scientists are hoping to find an answer during the human trial portion of this study; a trial which they hope will begin immediately.

To read the entire article regarding this study, click here.

For more information on what Home Instead Senior Care is doing to change the face of aging in Chapel Hill, click here.

Potential Cure For Baldness From Somewhere You'd Never Suspect

In a story almost too strange to report, scientists feel that they are on the verge of finding a cure for baldness.

About half of men over the age of 50 go bald or develop male pattern baldness. Some of us(ahem), don't make it to fifty years of age before we begin to reap tremendous savings on  hair products and combs. To this point, there are very few remedies that can address the problem. There are medications which can slow the loss. There are transplant procedures which move hair growing skin from other parts of the body to your noggin. But there are no real solutions to the issue of hair loss.

In new research which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the Columbia University Medical Center took their testing to a new level. Previously, most of the research being done involved transplanting hair follicles and attempting to make them grow. This yielded varying results which merited no real acclaim. So they decided to cultivate not just the follicles but the surrounding cells as well. Rather than transplanting singular follicles they cultured three dimensional spheres of cells and transplanted them upside down in human skin tissues.

This is where is gets a little bit weird.

They then grafted the human skin cells onto the backs of mice and were dazzled to see 5 of the 7 grafts produce hair that lasted at least six weeks. "The hairs were still small, but the researchers are encouraged because they used human skin that normally is completely hairless — the foreskins from circumcised babies. Essentially, they generated hair growth in cells that normally have no capacity for sprouting hair."


Yes, you read it right. I can't make this stuff up.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/10/21/closer-to-a-cure-for-baldness/#ixzz2iYZyMmbH