If we combine this research with the anti-aging research of Dr. David Sinclair, mice will soon overtake humans in both intelligence and lifespan. Thus making “the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” reality
Sinclair is a revolting person, with little professional dignity, who shamelessly manipulates his audience in interviews, spreading misleading scientific information, out of desperation to promote his personal brand.
Absolutely not. He is piggy-backing on the landmark work by other groups; he just re-applied it to the eye organ. The doxycyclin-based approach which this kind of studies are using can't be translated for clinical application in humans and in general partial reprogramming carries the risk of teratomas. So contrary to that tweet, it won't be ready for the clinic for years, decades, maybe never.
I think it's more likely to come from attempts to merge their brains with AI. ASI could do the pan-dimensional bit of "hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional creatures whose rodent aspect represents merely a three-dimensional projection of their actual form."
This mechanism sounds like it could have a strong nootropic effect for everyone not having totally ideal sleep. Whenever I sleep badly, or not long enough for some days in a row, my cognitive performance deteriorates rather quickly. Supposedly, the glymphatic system‘s work has a major role to play in this.
Melatonin also has been found to have a stimulating effect on the glymphatic system, though we need better trials on that.
I'm going to sound like a quack, but... I had long Covid for years. It was horrible. I said f it and started trying internet 'folk' remedies. Simply taking melatonin at night had me so much better in a month. I have mountain biked every day for the last two weeks it is awesome (other than my zero leg strength). Before that I didn't really even leave the house for 3 years. And I can think and write code at the level I used to again now that the brain fog is lifted. I think there were trials on this and they determined it didn't work but it's crazy a little bottle from the grocery store (USA here so it's over the counter) changed my life.
Melatonin and Magnesium together at night is amazing, if you want to keep experimenting. Watch out for the pre-packaged combos though that usually have Magnesium Oxide and is a bit laxative. I prefer Magnesium Glycinate which is a bit gentler on my stomach.
I’ve been very happy with Magnesium Threonate. It’s supposedly more efficient at crossing the blood-brain barrier than the Glycinate. (Both Threonate and Glycinate are more efficiently absorbed in the gut than the Oxide.)
I take a mix of L-Theanine and Magnesium Threonate before bed and sleep way better now (feel more rested with fewer hours of sleep, and the FitBit confirms I get more deep and REM sleep).
Personally I didn’t have good luck with melatonin. It puts me to sleep fine, but I tend to wake up exhausted after ~4 hours and unable to fall asleep again.
Creatine plus exercise. I add 1.5 tsp to my morning tea, plus 1/5 tsp NAD and 1/2 tsp of L-theanine, and I've doubled my workout and no longer have DOMS. It's like I'm a teenager again.
I tried it because I'd been getting 4-5 hours of broken sleep due to peripheral neuropathy from a congenital spinal disorder for the past four or five years, and I finally feel like I'm healing. It's wild being able to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Are there long term studies on the effects of creatine? I was asking given the evidence for increased cancer, and mortality associated with high red meat intake, but a lack of understanding re the causative mechanisms.
Creatine is one of the very few supplements that seems to have only upsides and few if any side effects (except the basically obligatory "minor stomach upsets for some people" ). You can take it every day at any time of day, the effects take a few weeks to build up.
The main downside is that the effects are small - most of the research is in strength and endurance training and it seems like at most there's a 5-10% increase in lifting endurance (IIRC, it's been a while since I researched this).
It's one of a very few supplements that I personally feel should be generally taken by most people (unless you eat a lot of red meat).
The others are omega 3 (unless you eat fish several times a week) and possibly magnesium as the western diet tends to be low in that.
If you want to read more about effects of creatine on the brain this is a good paper:
The consensus seems to be that supplementation of creatine is less clearly linked to increases in the brain than it is for muscle (although there have only been limited studies done), however, if you've ever suffered from depression, sleep deprivation or other neurological issues it's likely to be beneficial. For people without those issues, there's less evidence yet, but they would still get the benefit of more energy overall if not specifically more cognitive energy.
Creatine is awesome, but hair loss in men with male pattern baldness is frequently reported by myself and others in comments under all the "creatine is amazing no downsides" youtube posts and elsewhere. I've experienced it personally.
It could be that men who feel the need to start taking creatine are at the point in life where baldness is likely to occur, are taking other supplements that could be testosterone converting, are exploring these options as part of an unconscious recognition of an onset of balding, or are just becoming aware of existing balding due to greater self-awareness due to their self-improvement.
I'd put any one of those ahead of "creatine made me go bald".
The link to baldness comes indirectly through increasing DHT. The increase in DHT, if I understand right, can speed up existing hair loss. Where it gets shaky is that DHT is also increased by excersize and follow-up studies accounting for that found a decrease in DHT while on creatine. So we don’t know yet, basically, and you should stop if there is a concern.
The caveat is finding a high-quality supply of creatine. So many on-line reviews for once great brands of creatine powder talk about how those brands recently switched to a new supplier, how the consistency changed to that of powdered sugar, and how all of a sudden they were getting major gastrointestinal problems from a brand that used to be good.
It's hard to know where to go for the right kind of supplement. I've taken it as an exercise supplement in the past with no seeming downsides, but in a few hours search, I couldn't find a supply that doesn't have dozens to hundreds of these complaints against it.
Kre-Alkyn on Amazon has a patented method of getting it past the stomach acid which I’ve found, over many, years, removes the bloating issues with monohydrate (most common)
I don't know your dosage and use case but under creatine loading (5+ grams/die), water weight and bloating becomes a very, very noticeable side effect (in responders).
afaik that's temporary and lasts only a few weeks, even if maintaining the loading dose.
The effect also seems localized to muscles so unless you are overweight the effect is mostly flattering.
I originally put it in, along with vitamin c during flu season, but felt I haven't personally done enough research to make claims about them. Regarding vitamin d, I am unsure about whether it should be taken with vitamin k or not.
Everyday. It's retained in skeletal muscle, so I consider it similar to carb loading on off days. I exercise at least lightly every morning and get around 5 miles in a day. My biggest struggle is being diligent about getting enough protein and calories.
From everything I've read, creatine is as close to being a "free benefit" as it gets. I didn't experience any overt improvement just from taking it, as in, no extra energy or motivation. However, I'd stalled on all of my exercises for about a year, and after a week of "loading" 10g/day, I started back and instantly hit my max reps in a single set. I didn't want to hurt myself and was scared of DOMS, so I waited another week before trying again (I had a single day of soreness). After a light warmup, I immediately did it again. The results of that have been highly motivating, and I've remained excited to push myself.
The only side effect is that I enjoy my tea slightly less. Creatine doesn't have a flavor, but it makes everything taste 20% less delicious, somehow.
You need to be drinking more water while taking creatine. This is important to point out because the side effects of not getting enough water are very rough and taking creatine can put you there faster.
I‘m taking creatine every day, and think it’s great for various reasons. Do you think it has an affect on sleep quality itself, or does it just improve things during the day?
I personally find that sleep quality does drop a bit but I also don’t need as much every night. The sleep-tracking apps I use say the opposite though, that quality is much higher and I get more hours in. It’s a bit of a different flavour of sleep maybe, that the apps aren’t tuned for.
They went with the premise of "a little a day seems to help, what happens if we feed ridiculous quantities once". The sort of medical research that appeals to the engineer in me and something you can only really do with compounds that are already known to be unlikely to kill your patient if you exceed the usual dose. Also I strongly suspect they did this to students given the age range.
There's more literature out there than this. That paper's references are probably a reasonable start point. But as creatine is very cheap and has been widely consumed by athletes for ages now it's about as low risk a gamble as any out there.
Are there non drug methods which could restore or assist lymph pumping functions in the head-neck region? Should we all be doing some kind of rotation/lift/squeeze cycle on our cervical spine region?
Mild to moderate exercise won't fix it, but intense exercise, e.g. running or similar, carries hope. Good sleep will slow the damage, but after a certain age, e.g. 80, it may not work.
I have tried it in this context, but no, I'm sorry. Only running and similar intense cardio exercises had an applicable effect for me. That's not to say that other exercises are useless; obviously they're not, but the other exercises didn't help this particular issue for me.
That might set you up for overtraining. If your ability to regenerate is good/fast enough, it might work. Measuring heart rate variability is a good indicator for when you’re ready for more exercise.
All of it is ultimately needed. Cardio, yes, but resistance training is also needed to maintain muscle mass, and maybe even more important as we age, bone density.
Lymphatic massage should help. It has helped my recurring ear issues tremendously, and is actually quick and easy to do. There are plenty of YouTube videos out there, some for the whole body and some for the face/neck area.
Nafaik, but anything that gives you two extra hours of sleep should help. Also, intense exercise should over time help heal it in part. And as far as drug methods go, a 2-3 month course of memantine could be worth exploring for anyone who doesn't have to drive or operate machinery for the first month.
I’m convinced we are going to discover that “qi work” is moving lymph through the connective tissue (a phenomenon we only just discovered a decade ago). The proscriptions against doing these exercises or massage during an illness is my clue/circumstantial evidence and I hope it gets studied more.
Jade roller/gua sha? Also look up "post ffs lymphatic massage" or similar. This helps me when my immune system is acting up.
Not sure if it'd help with the CSF specifically, but this is how to move lymph out of the head.
This study in aging adults measured amyloid in blood with phase-targeted auditory stimulation, the technology we've been developing at affectablesleep.com - it's not exactly the same as measuring the glymphatic process, but might be related.
Since you seem knowledgeable, what do you think of the idea of blocks in lymph, eg through scar tissue or infections, which might need extra massage? Is there something to this?
It’s difficult to get objective measures of how something makes you feel when you already feel bad.
About half of my best food experiences came after a stressful physical experience. I know that food wasn’t as amazing as my brain was telling me it was, but I still enjoyed the experience. The other people in that Dairy Queen were absolutely not having the transcendental experience my friend and I were enjoying.
“Brain swelling” sounds like it would put a lot of things into a new perspective.
My measure was - definitely could get more work done in a day compared to any day in the previous 10 years. Dexamethasone prescribed for swelling probably means it also works on removing fluids from the brain, similar to the drug described in the article.
Not that I recommend it for anyone, the drug has terrible side effects.
Not sure why you think weight is such a key variable. Might make sense if you had focused in bone mineral density—although mice have been extremely useful to study osteoblast and osteoclast biology.
Mice gave us a very solid understanding of cancer genetics. Cancer was initially thought of as an almost purely environmental disease. Thanks to “in mice” we learned that genetic susceptibility is a major factor.
Transplantation biology and immunology have profited enormously from mouse models—-and more “recently” everything from monoclonal antibodies to CAR-T cells.
And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things. I can assure you that mouse models are highly useful and translationally relevant to many neurological, behavioral, developmental, and physiological studies of the mammalian brain.
> Not sure why you think weight is such a key variable.
I worked in cancer research-adjacent area (on computational biology). The problem with mice was that cancers in mice necessarily contain fewer cells than human cancers.
So a lot of treatments can simply clear these cancers completely, without giving them a chance to evolve resistance. Yes, you can try to compensate for that, but it just is not reliable.
In addition, mice are notoriously naturally susceptible to cancer. So their cancers, counter-intuitively, are often less evolved as a result.
> And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things.
I basically mean "degenerative brain diseases", very much including aging.
> This is why mice and rodents are used to test initial viability before then moving on to theraputics development.
They are used because they're the _only_ way to test drugs early in development. Animal cruelty laws make it nearly impossible to use non-murine species for initial drug tests.
Additionally, mice are easy to breed and to keep, and there's a great variety of specialized genetic lines.
Absolutely, yet the underlying similarity between our genomes makes it good enough for most cases, plus the Rodent genome has been sequenced and tested for decades now.
Idk why you are trying to die on this hill. I've provided decently authoritative sources (The Jackson Institute, Cambridge University, and the NIH)
Unless you have a PhD in Systems Biology or Genomics, I'm going to trust them over you.
Edit: an actual OG in the field of genomics just commented - listen/chat with him, not me.
For most cases, yes. Antibiotics discovery? Sure, mice are awesome.
But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer. That's why comments "in mice" are appropriate in these areas.
And it's not at all controversial, here are my citations:
As a layman, why should I trust your citation over studies that highlight the advantages of using mice in aging research? - [0]
> But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer
If mice is really bad for research in the fields you mentioned, why do scientists around the world continue to use it? Wouldn’t they know it’s a dead end?
Ditto from Phase 1 to Phase 3. Side effects always an issue. One could say only half in jest that humans are not particularly good models for humans. Exceedingly expensive and all kind of environmental and compliance confounders.
At least when using rodent you can control the environmental factors in a randomized controller “clinic” trials. Compliance not so hard to ensure.
