Current Events > One of my friends is convinced the whole 'blood boy' thing is proven science

(+) Yeah! (+)

For those that don't know, some billionaires are injecting themselves with the blood of younger men because it supposedly extends their life.

Obviously to anyone with common sense that's bullshit. But I don't want to look it up to argue with my friend and prove them wrong. But he got really upset at me today because I told him it's fucking dumb lol

... Are people actually doing this? I thought this was just like qanon deep state dumb shit?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion

You could just send him that.

ssjevot posted...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion

You could just send him that.

Cool gonna do that now lol

Smashingpmkns posted...

For those that don't know, some billionaires are injecting themselves with the blood of younger men because it supposedly extends their life.

Obviously to anyone with common sense that's bullshit. But I don't want to look it up to argue with my friend and prove them wrong. But he got really upset at me today because I told him it's fucking dumb lol

There is SOME basis on this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/517426a

It's called parabiosis, but you have to be stitched to a younger human being, not just using their blood.

More key terms that you probably want to look into for aging if you want to convince your buddy otherwise is cellular senescence, telomerase, and the hayflick limit. There's more to look into if you're REALLY interested in the aging stuff.

In case you don't want to read the whole thing here are the precautionary tales about doing such things without thinking it all the way through.

Wagers is eager to see the results, but she worries that a failure would be difficult to interpret and so could set the whole field back. Plasma from a 30-year-old donor may not contain factors beneficial to patients with Alzheimer's, for example. She, Rando and others would prefer to see testing for a specific blood factor or combination of known factors synthesized in the lab, for which the mechanism of action is fully understood.
There are also lingering concerns as to whether activating stem cells which is what the young blood most often seems to do over a long period of time would result in too much cell division. My suspicion is that chronic treatments with anything plasma, drugs that rejuvenate cells in old animals is going to lead to an increase in cancer, says Rando. Even if we learn how to make cells young, it's something we'll want to do judiciously.
Michael Conboy is concerned for another reason: he has seen enough paired mice die of parabiotic disease to be cautious about trying it in humans. I would be leery of any trial in which significant amounts of blood or plasma were transfused into an older person regularly, he says. Alkahest's chief executive, Karoly Nikolich, says that he understands the safety concerns, but he emphasizes that millions of blood and plasma transfusions have been carried out safely in humans.

Basically what rich people are doing is they read these titles of mice surviving off of young blood and go OK GIVE ME YOUNG BLOOD JUST LIKE THOSE MICE, without thinking things through. Whatever, if you want to throw your money away pointlessly without thinking they'll be happy to provide transfusions from younger people. Have fun placeboing yourself into thinking you're younger.

There's a lot of basis on blood having factors in it that help a lot.

Did you guys know that because of the nuclear bombings in japan, people had to have transfusions as they weren't able to make more of their own blood? They then discovered that some people who got transfusions just never needed anymore transfusions. A japanese scientist looked into this and bam, blood/hematopoeitic stem cells were discovered (man the sources on this are weird, what you learn in class may not always be correct). Here's a short one liner about it apparently.

In 1945, civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exposed to atomic bomb explosions and radiation, and in retrospect, those who died from the lowest lethal dose of irradiation almost certainly died of hematopoietic failure.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2574516/

There ARE things in blood that get discovered. The tech is only getting better as cellular identification improves along with finding the purpose of those cells.

TL;DR: Main point being, just because it works for mice doesn't mean it works for humans.