REVERSAL OF AGE, IS IT POSSIBLE??

 

IS THE TELOMERE CONTRACTION AGEING THEORY TRUE?

A recent theory on aging claims that telomeres, caps on chromosomes that guard against genetic information loss during replication,

Age-related telomere shortening exposes the chromosomal DNA and may lead to the loss of some pairs or sections of DNA’s gene sequence that might be one of the hypotheses.

I’ll make my case using recent, active research that contends that the information contained in DNA is lost in two different ways, leading to aging and the malfunctioning of bodily cells.

Actual reasons why people age

There are actually two forms of information.

DNA contains genetic information in the form of repetitive patterns of its four DNA base pairs.

Researches claim that the DNA samples can be taken out from even thousands of years old mummies, so the chances of telomere contraction and loss of information are not many.

But there is another way that affects DNA expression that is epigenetics. Telomere 

How a single cell leads to a whole individual

 The start of human life is from a single cell. Called the zygote is actually formed by the combination of an egg from the mother and a sperm cell from the father.

23 number which chromosomes come from each parent, means half of the genetic information in any individual is from both the parents and expressed as a different individual both from father and mother.  

That single cell in the womb multiplies many times and makes multiple similar copies of its own, then the next process of cell differentiation starts.

As you can say the lump of the cells which are going to be a part of the liver will turn on some of the genes that help them perform their liver function and the rest are turned off, this is the way the heart cells, muscles cells, immune cells, etc. differentiate and know their job.

These proteins that control which genes are on and off are the epigenetic factors. We call these genes the sirtuins and they make enzymes they're very important and they require a molecule called NAD+

What is NAD+?

 NAD is a molecule necessary for life, and without it, we would perish in 30 seconds, as anyone who remembers their high school biology will recall.

The issue is that as we age, we believe that we have less and less NAD+, so by the time you're 50, you may have even half of what you did when you were 20. 

Now that we know that sirtuins appear to regulate the epigenetic information

That epigenetic data is not as secure as digital data. It resembles the analog data on a CD. We might lose the ability to translate part of the information from a scratched CD. But what if we are successful in retrieving all the data? The environment must be swiftly adapted by epigenetic information.

Depending on multiple factors like, what we eat, exercise, etc. Sirtuins are the proteins dependent on NAD+ that are involved in DNA transcriptional regulation, metabolism, apoptosis (programmed death of unwanted cells), and differentiation (certain genes turned on for certain functions). And aging. 

Dr David Sinclair’s Lab is working on some sort of noise going on all the time so that cells eventually turn the wrong genes on so that your nerve cells start to feel like they're skin cells and we found that kidney cells start to resemble and act more like muscle cells

Some experiments reveal that cutting the DNA leads to the disruption of the epigenome and can cause aging, if it can be caused, can it be taken away?

Shinya Yamanaka, won the Nobel Prize for discovering genes that convert adult cells into stem cells ( the cells in the womb which were not differentiated for their function yet) so you can reverse aging in the dish working in a lab but can you reverse it in an animal?

Some experiments at Dr David Sinclair's lab initiated the regrowth of optic nerves something that normally doesn't happen in an adult animal but only happens in a very young animal

We’re close to having molecules that may help us reverse the actual cause of aging. That is not a promise of living forever but can improve the life span a lot. You may have to go to the doctor to get that certain set of medicines that may reverse your age for about 10, years. Then after 10 years, you may have to get back to the doctor to get that dose again to stay alive and young.

Along with it, there are a set of healthy habits we can adopt in our daily life to slow down the process of losing information. We will discuss those in our next blog.