[ExI] Life extension - but what about Alzheimer's?

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Sat Mar 9 17:28:01 UTC 2019


Body Regeneration Plus Brain Degeneration may Result to "Zombies"
Richelle H. Concio Mar 09, 2019

<https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/18433/20190309/body-regeneration-plus-brain-degeneration-result-zombies.htm>

Quote:
The oldest person who lived reached the age of 122. With this,
scientists say that the new lifespan of an average human could now be
120. Recently, researchers have reported the possibility of living up
to 180 years of age. This will warrant, however, a careful regimen of
restricted calorie intake.

Many studies are being conducted to prolong the average human
lifespan. There are medicines, supplements, medical procedures, and
searches for different cures all in the hopes of extending life.
Laboratories across the globe are on a quest to find out why cells age
and how to stop it from doing so.

A professor in cardiovascular sciences from King's College London,
Mauri Giacca, argues how pointless it is to keep one's body alive
while its brain is degenerating. Giacca pointed out how impractical it
is to have a healthy body and a low-functioning brain. As the body and
the brain ages, certain effects of degeneration manifest in the human
body. One of the most common cases where the brain is functioning
poorly is when a person undergoes dementia. In Britain, there are
around 850,000 people suffering from dementia. By 2025, this number
will rise to about a million. There has already been a mountain of
effort, time and resources being dedicated to come up with a drug or
therapy to reverse dementia. However, setbacks have been rendering
these efforts with no promising results and developments.

Giacca explains that moving slower when a human grows older is a
result of having 10 to 15% of the brain to have died already. A human
body typically loses 80,000 neurons per day and there has been no
studies on how to regenerate them. At this rate, reaching 80 to 90
years of age could mean a that the human brain has already lost a lot.
This also opens the person to the risk of suffering from Alzheimer's
disease where neuron loss is accelerated much faster.

If this is the case, then continued attempts to regenerate the body
without a solution for a degenerating brain can be compared to a
zombie outbreak, like those seen on movies. The bodies are perfect,
strong and healthy but the brain does not have the capacity to reason
or to think at all.
-----------------

There is a lot that has to be developed at the same time as
anti-ageing treatments.
Disease cures, for example.
If the body lives longer then medical maintenance costs may have to
increase significantly.

BillK


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