Our primary focus at senior fitness has, for many years, has been on promoting strategies for “Preserving Fitness into Advanced Age”; there has, so far, been little attention to evolving methods for repairing accumulated damage so as to radically extend the youth-span of human life to perhaps hundreds of years. From here on I will be documenting progress made by the burgeoning Rejuvenation industry in a new category: Rejuvenation Strategies. 

A reasonably good place to start is to look at beneficial factors that decline with age as well as detrimental factors that increase with age and see if we can’t find ways to prevent these changes for a far greater span of time. In finding practical ways to facilitate these aspects of aging, I suspect we will unlock secrets to radically extend human life span and eliminate much of what we call disease from our experience.

Two targets that are being attacked today are killing-off Senescent Cells, and increasing NAD+/NADH levels, both of which present opportunities for radical improvement in quality of life and lengthening of Health-span or Youth-span. The biggest bang for the buck that we can use today is to boost NAD+ levels to those of youth, thereby improving energy availability  for virtually every metabolic process, including repair of nearly everything that needs repairing.

Boosting NAD+ levels:

The best supplier for everything NAD, or NMN its precursor, is Alive by Nature; they developed the process for making it commercially available and pioneered methods of getting it into our systems, bypassing the oral route which degrades it to nicotinamide. All their products are either sublingual powder, tabs or liposomal gel, or nasal sprays, or transdermal skin products. Sublingual application bypasses the first-pass liver filtration, and the nasal spray basically gets it directly into the blood entering the brain. I’ve been using several of their products for the last three years with great reward. The first thing I noticed was not needing naps during the day (at 78 yrs-old; quite surprising). I’ve yet to try the skin products, but I’ve had two winter bouts with follicular eczema and plan to test them out soon.

For a deeper understanding of NAD and Aging Read : NAD AND THE AGING PROCESS: ROLE IN LIFE, DEATH AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN   Or at least the Abstract.

Senescent Cell elimination:

Cells which have stopped dividing (senescent) have proven to be a major producer of inflammation and are toxic in many ways to surrounding tissue. When we are young, our immune system is on alert to kill cells as they stop replicating. Repair of injury involves the immune system. Immune cells rush in to destroy any invading organisms, initiate inflammation, flood the region with cells to eat and clean out the damaged tissue and start the repair of the wound, by coaxing undamaged cells to multiply and rebuild and replace lost tissues. Part of the repair quality is halting  the proliferation of cells beyond the original structure bounds and part of that process is the induction of senescence and then killing and removal of senescent cells.

As we age however, the immune system gets less attentive to senescent cells and misses some. As they accumulate, they create an inflammatory environment, secreting an assortment of pro-inflammatory signalling chemicals know as SASP (Senescence-Associated-Secretory-Phenotype). This environment induces surrounding cells to enter senescence and spreads inflammation throughout surrounding tissues. Animal studies show that injecting a young animal with senescent cells from an aging animal quickly speeds up virtually all markers of aging in the young animal. So it is with humans; with the accumulation of sufficient senescent cells we begin a cascade of accelerated aging, ultimately resulting in death. Researchers questioned whether removal of senescent cells would lower local inflammation, and that proved to be the case.

The search for substances capable of destroying senescent cells (Senolytics) or for returning them to non-SASP status (Senostatics) is an exploding industry. First observed in cancer therapies, the ability to selectively target and kill senescent cells was the property for screening and testing of a catalog of such drugs. One of the first used in animal studies was Dasatanib and when paired with a natural compound found in many foods, Quersetin, it proved to be a strong and selective senolytic. Human trials are underway and, as per usual, taking forever to come to any fruition.

Here is one of the studies done with that combination: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352396419305912