Accumulated Wastes: Those Telltale Brown Spots II

Lipofuscin pigment appears very early in life. It has been observed by some scientists in fetal nerve cells, though others have not found it in children under 10. In the cerebral cortex of rats, Dr. Kenneth R. Brizzee and his co-workers found a ten-fold increase in the amount of pigment in aged rats compared to […]

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Our Subversive Free Radicals II

Mutations to your DNA caused by free radicals are a major cause of cancer. Free radicals can make blood clot abnormally in our arteries by destroying our body’s ability to make PGI, (prostacyclin), a natural anti-clot hormone found in healthy arteries. Free radicals are also implicated in arthritis. Most of the brain damage caused by […]

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Cross-linked Molecules and Aging in Skin, Arteries, and Other Tissues III

Proteins are complex molecules, made up of amino acids, which perform a wide variety of functions in the human body, from chemical reaction-controlling enzymes, to structural molecules like collagen, to necessary components in human memory. In order to function properly, proteins must assume a correct three-dimensional configuration. In their proper shape, some proteins act as […]

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Cross-linked Molecules and Aging in Skin, Arteries, and Other Tissues I

Empiricism may serve to accumulate facts, but it will never build science. The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds. —Claude Bernard, 1813-1878 When your skin wrinkles, or arteries or bread hardens, or rubber becomes brittle, or old Jell-O® stiffens, we are seeing examples of the […]

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Aging and the Immune System I

… just as the pigment of the hair is destroyed by phagocytes, so also the atrophy of other organs of the body, in old age, is very frequently due to the action of devouring cells which I have called macrophages. —Elie Metchnikoff, The Prolongation of Life (1908) Instead of preventing diseases only by protecting the […]

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Molecules of Life and Life Extension: An Introduction to the Cast II

Most vitamins are soluble in either the watery or the fatty tissues of our bodies, but not in both. Vitamins C and B are water soluble; vitamins A, E, D, and K are fat soluble. Both types of vitamins are necessary for health and long life. We have different storage capacities for different vitamins. For […]

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How Aging Kills II

The production of slightly different versions of enzymes and hormones might also lead to autoimmune disease, since the immune system might identify some of these versions as foreign proteins and subsequently launch a self-destructive attack on the body’s own cells which produce them. Dr. W. Donner Denckla thinks that part of the death genes’ process […]

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