BY RICHARD FARAGHER
Just one more piece of evidence that a bowl of fruit won’t do you any harm.
The aging global population is the greatest challenge faced by 21st-century healthcare systems. Even COVID-19 is, in a sense, a disease of aging.
The risk of death from the virus roughly doubles for every nine years of life, a pattern that is almost identical to a host of other illnesses. But why are old people vulnerable to so many different things?
It turns out that a major hallmark of the aging process in many mammals is inflammation. By that, I don’t mean intense local response we typically associate with an infected wound, but a low grade, grinding, inflammatory background noise that grows louder the longer we live. This “inflammaging” has been shown to contribute to the development of atherosclerosis (the buildup of fat in arteries), diabetes, high blood pressure , frailty, cancer and cognitive decline.
Now a new study published in Nature reveals that microglia — a type of white blood cells found in the brain — are extremely vulnerable to changes in the levels of a major inflammatory molecule called prostaglandin E2(PGE2). The team found that exposure to this molecule badly affected the ability of microglia and related cells to generate energy and carry out normal cellular processes.
Fortunately, the researchers found that these effects occurred only because of PGE2’s interaction with one specific receptor on the microglia. By disrupting it, they were able to normalize cellular energy production and reduce brain inflammation. The result was improved cognition in aged mice. This offers hope that the cognitive impairment associated with growing older is a transient state we can potentially fix, rather than the inevitable consequence of aging of the brain.
Continue reading… “SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO REVERSE AGING IN THE BRAIN”
