Aging is inevitable… Or is it?
We’ve talked before about how and why aging happens. We’ve also talked about the work to tackle aging as basically an engineering problem, with the premise that our bodies are biological machines, and machines can be repaired. We also recommended a great book about this, by the way. But that’s about interfering with the biological process of aging. What about if the damage is already done?
“When the damage is done, it’s done”
We can do a lot to try to protect ourselves from aging, and we might be able to slow down the clock, but we can’t stop it, and we certainly can’t reverse it… right?
Wrong! Or at least, so we currently understand, in some respects. Supplementation with phosphatidylserine, for example, has shown promise for not just preventing, but treating, neurodegeneration (such as that caused by Alzheimer’s disease). It’s not a magic bullet and so far the science is at “probably” and “this shows great promise for…” and “this appears to…”
Phosphatidylserene does help slow neurodegeneration
…because of its role in allowing your cells to know whether they have permission to die.
This may seem a flippant way of putting it, but it’s basically how cell death works. Cells do need to die (if they don’t, that’s called cancer) and be replaced with new copies, and those copies need to be made before too much damage is accumulated (otherwise the damage is compounded with each new iteration). So an early cell death-and-replacement is generally better for your overall health than a later one.
However, neurons are tricky to replace, so phosphatidylserine effectively says “not you, hold on” to keep the rate of neuronal cell death nearer to the (slow) rate at which they can be replaced.
One more myth to bust…
For the longest time we thought that adults, especially older adults, couldn’t make new brain cells at all, that we grew a certain number, then had to hang onto them until we died… suffering diminished cognitive ability with age, on account of losing brain cells along the way.
It’s partly true: it’s definitely easier to kill brain cells than to grow them… Mind you, that’s technically true of people, too, yet the population continues to boom!
Anyway, new research showing that adults do, in fact, grow new braincells was briefly challenged by a 2018 study that declared: Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults after all, never mind, go back to your business.
So was adult neurogenesis just a myth to be busted after all? Nope.
It turned out, the 2018 study had a methodological flaw!
To put it in lay terms: they had accidentally melted the evidence.
A 2019 study overcame this flaw by using a shorter fixation time for the cell samples they wanted to look at, and found that there were tens of thousands of “baby neurons” (again with the lay terms), newly-made brain cells, in samples from adults ranging from 43 to 87.
Now, there was still a difference: the samples from the youngest adult had 30% more newly-made braincells than the 87-year-old, but given that previous science thought brain cell generation stopped in childhood, the fact that an 87-year-old was generating new brain cells 30% less quickly than a 43-year-old is hardly much of a criticism!
As an aside: samples from patients with Alzheimer’s also had a 30% reduction in new braincell generation, compared to samples from patients of the same age without Alzheimer’s. But again… Even patients with Alzheimer’s were still growing some new brain cells.
Read it for yourself: Adult hippocampal neurogenesis is abundant in neurologically healthy subjects and drops sharply in patients with Alzheimer’s disease
In a nutshell…
- We can’t fully hit pause on aging just yet, but we can definitely genuinely slow it
- We can also, in some very specific ways, reverse it
- We can slow the loss of brain cells
- We can grow new brain cells
- We can reduce our risk of Alzheimer’s, and at least somewhat mitigate it if it appears
- We know that phosphatidylserine supplementation may help with most (if not all) of the above
- We don’t sell that (or anything else) but for your convenience, here it is on Amazon if you’re interested
