The New Fountain Of Youth? Young Blood!

How do you make an old mouse young again? Pump it with new blood. No, it’s not “Twilight: Rat Edition,” its science!

And just to make things more interesting, I included Rob Lowe.

According to the “New York Times”, scientists at Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco did similar studies that involved injecting older mice with young mouse blood. Guess what? After the injections, the older mice demonstrated impressive achievements in brain function.

While parabiosis (when two animals were stitched together like Frankenstein to study the change in their bodies) has been proven to benefit older animals, just an injection of younger blood into an older mouse had not.

Science Magazine notes that scientists found that mice injected with the protein GFD11 (a protein found in the blood) were able to recover from muscle injuries, as well as grow new blood vessels, spark brain functions, and olfactory neurons almost as well as mice who had been under the effects of parabiosis.

What does this mean those of us who aren’t of the rat persuasion? Well, it might not reverse your crow’s feet, but it does show promise for Nana’s Alzheimer’s.

What extremes would you use to recapture your youth? Is this one of them?  I’d inject WD-40 into my veins if it made me young again!

Of course, when I hear the term "Youngblood", I always think of the movie with Rob Lowe, which features a totally different form of giving blood.