Plasma therapy to reverse age-related decline

Abstract

There is extensive evidence that young blood and plasma possess revitalizing properties in old animals of the same species. In parabiosis experiments, where the circulatory systems of two animals of different ages are joined, a phenotypic change from old animals to the phenotype of a young animal, and vice versa, has been observed. Later works managed to elucidate that the factors responsible for these changes were in the plasmatic fraction of the blood. In our work, inspired by parabiosis experiments, plasma extracted from the blood of young rats was injected into elderly rats, achieving appreciable phenotypic improvements compared to control animals. In this work, we report that repeated injections of young rat plasma to females, initially 25 months old, prolongs the half-life of the animals by almost 2.5 months (about 10 % of their natural lifespan). Treated rats maintained a more youthful appearance than untreated controls. Blood methylation analysis revealed that treated rats remained epigenetically younger than controls.