Young Blood Rejuvenates the Brain

And more surprising updates on keeping your brain active and functional

Yup, Count Dracula was onto something - well as long as he was sucking the blood for youngsters that is. No wonder he was considered immortal (except those pesky limitations such as daylight and crucifixes).

The story of young blood is not new but new research has now come in on its effectiveness - but also on exactly what it is about young blood that can revitalise the brain (and body). For those who don’t know what I’m talking about I’m talking of blood, or blood plasm transfusions, from young people to old people which some claim (with good evidence) has magical anti-aging effects.

That also comes on top of multiple other pieces of research that show how to dramatically reduce the risk of cognitive decline in the brain. Please read on:

Young Blood

The story of young blood did the rounds a few weeks ago with reports in The New York Times, the Independent, New Scientist (again), and many others - to which I thought: “Oh boring, old hat, I’ve known that for years!”

Indeed, this is actually nothing new, and apparently something proposed and touted by Alexander Bogdanov in the early 1900’s. But a more Frankenstein rather than Dracula process is known as parabiosis - this is when you stitch two animals together - often mice. Poor things.

Or maybe not poor things - though bizarre, modern research has become more ethical and less brutal and in a Stanford experiment in 2005 old mice had their blood streams connected to young mice. Yes, still sounds weird. It is weird. But for good intentions - this was to explore the regeneration of stem cells which in older age seem to stop losing the ability to regenerate.

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And the outcome was that when connecting the blood stream of young mice and old mice, stem cells in the old mice started behaving more like their younger counterparts. So, lucky old mice. However, the downside being that the stem cells in the young mice started behaving more like those in their older counterparts. So, poor young mice.

This showed that stem cells were responding to the environment they were in. That’s 18 years ago now…which is why I was surprised this story was doing the rounds again. Admittedly, it sometimes takes a long time for scientific research to move into the mainstream.

There has in the meantime been a bunch of further research into this showing the benefits of young blood and its rejuvenating effects - yes, and there are providers who will sell you, and give you transfusion of young blood plasma (for a lot of$ $). But before you go off running to get a bit of young blood you might want to think of easier ways to do this. And this is what the more recent research has done - it has verified the previous positive findings but also discovered some of the precise mechanisms which might give us a much easier access to the rejuvenating benefits of young blood.

Young blood doesn’t have some secret magical property - researchers from the University of Queensland have discovered precisely what young blood can do.

It’s your platelets

The research ended up zooming in on platelets because these have been shown to be involved in multiple processes. Platelets are produced in our bone marrow and help your blood clot amongst other things. They discovered something called CXCL4/Platelet factor 4, let’s just go PF4 for short, that is released from platelets during exercise and this stimulates the immune system, reduces inflammation, and stimulates plasticity, growth of new cells, across the brain. Not bad.

And injecting PF4 into mice is just as effective as young blood or young blood plasma! Yup, just a simple shot of this.

This makes PF4 quite the wonder stuff. For us normal folks without access to a research lab you can actually ramp up your own PF4 production simply: by doing exercise.

And indeed PF4 has also been touted as a simulation for exercise in the brain i.e. no need to exercise just get yourself an injection of PF4. The researchers see its benefits for those aged or bed-ridden not for normal folk, though. And indeed exercise is the best medicine for multiple other reasons such as muscle function and heart health and more as I will outline below. Which is why actual exercise will always be the best option.

So, this is why the story did the rounds but it should read CXCL4/Platelet factor 4 rejuvenates your brain. “Young blood” still sounds better, eh!

This, as you noticed, is another one to add to the massive amount of evidence for exercise (see also: “Light Activity Improves Brain Function” and “How Exercise Helps New Brain Cells Grow”) - alas, you still have to exercise but reading the above also reminded me of another study, recently out, which stimulated the benefits of exercise, without exercising, and without injecting anything into your body.