Aging is risky for most medical conditions. The older you get, the harder it becomes to do most tasks, including fighting a virus-like COVID-19.
Various teams of researchers are trying to slow down aging, reverse it, or even de-age some organs. A team of researchers from Standford specialized in the latter category, and they may have found out how to reverse the aging of the brain.
It appears that the immune system is part of the reason why the brain ages. The scientists discovered a process to reverse mental aging in mice, and the experiments showed positive results on human cells in lab conditions.
Still, those are just primordial steps toward the development of medication that may one day prevent medical conditions related to cognitive decline.
Dr. Katrin Andreasson’s team published an analysis in the journal Nature, where they spoke of their initial attempts to de-age the brain.
As Standford Medicine states, biologists have long speculated that inflammation may be responsible for the aging process. Decreasing it may slow down the onset of various conditions like the loss of mental accuracy and responsiveness.
Andreasson’s team has possibly figured what provokes some immune cells to neglect inflammatory processes in the human body and how to stop them.
Their research suggests that a kind of immune cells known as myeloid cells go into overdrive as the years pass, resulting in inflammation inside tissues, including the brain. The myeloid cells’ jobs consist of cleaning up debris, feeding other cells with nutrients, and looking out for pathogens. However, as they get older, they begin misbehaving, and that affects the nearby tissue.
“If you adjust the immune system, you can de-age the brain,” Andreasson stated.
