With accurate experiment and observation to work upon,
imagination becomes the architect of physical theory.
—John Tyndall
If you didn’t carry out the garbage, you would soon be buried in waste. If you were only able to dispose-of some of your garbage, it would take longer, but eventually you would suffer the same fate. Do our cells accumulate waste products of metabolism over the years—wastes that eventually poison us?
Unfortunately, they do. One of the most noticeable wastes is yellowish-brown stuff that builds up in our skin and brain cells. These “age spots” contain the age pigment lipofuscin. Many scientists believe that lipofuscin damages our brain cells by clogging them so that vital nutrients cannot flow
freely in the cells. By using the right nutrients and, optionally, certain prescription drugs, we can slow the rate of accumulation of lipofuscin and also speed up its removal. We can see ugly brown age spots in the skin disappear, over a period of several months, and stay away. Evidence indicates that similar events take place with regard to the accumulated age
pigments in our brain cells.
Some scientists propose that aging (or at least parts of it) can be explained by the accumulation with age of toxic by-products of metabolism. There are, in fact, several materials which accumulate with age that seem to be associated with random aging damage.
Dr. A. L. Tappel points out that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man, a mouse, a fruit fly, or even a cup of coffee or a slice of toast, you will still accumulate certain fluorescent pigments as you age. (Even foods are subject to aging via the same free radical reactions which cause human skin and
nerve cells to accumulate lipofuscin pigment.)
When lipofuscin deposits appear in the skin, they are often called “age spots” or “liver spots,” and are yellow-brown or brown spots which are not freckles, birthmarks, or scars. Lipofuscin pigment accumulates in nerve cells (neurons) in the brain too, more in some areas than in others. It is a pigment that can be made to fluoresce yellowish to yellow-green,
orange, or yellow-brown under ultraviolet light. Measurement of this fluorescence is how the amount of pigment present is determined. Lipofuscin is found, in addition to neurons, in heart muscle, skeletal muscle, voluntary muscle, liver, adrenals, and other organs and tissues, particularly fatty tissues.
Drs. Chio and A. L. Tappel found that lipofuscin has a fluorescence spectra identical to compounds made from malonaldehyde (an aldehyde breakdown product of peroxidized fats) and amino compounds such as proteins. It is now widely accepted that both lipofuscin and ceroid (another type of age pigment) form as a result of peroxidative reactions in structures within cells, especially membranes, which often contain unsaturated fats. It is thought that the cellular lysosomes (packets of tissue-dissolving enzymes found in cells) engulf these damaged membranes, and the material that the lysosomes cannot digest remains as lipofuscin or ceroid debris.
It is not yet fully understood how lipofuscin and other age pigments might damage these tissues. In 1974, Drs. D. M. A. Mann and P. O. Yates found that, as the amount of lipofuscin in a cell increased, there was a corresponding decrease in the cellular RNA content. Other researchers believe that the pigments stored as wastes in cells do not interfere with cellular
metabolism until they reach a critical volume. It is known that such deposits can interfere with diffusion-dependent biochemical reactions and could also lead to cell failure by blocking cytoplasm flow. The tissues of aged fruit flies contain lipopigments (lipid-derived age pigments like lipofuscin) which sometimes fill up to 50 percent of the cell volume. The
fluorescence spectrum for fruit fly lipopigments is similar to
that of aged mouse lipofuscin.
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