The effects of blood on aging were first discovered in experiments that stitched young and old mice together so that they shared circulating blood. Older mice seem to benefit from such an arrangement, developing healthier organs and becoming protected from age-related disease. But young mice aged prematurely.
Such experiments suggest that, while young blood can be restorative, there is something in old blood that is actively harmful. Now Hanadie Yousef at Stanford University in California seems to have identified a protein that is causing some of the damage, and has developed a way to block it.
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Yousef has found that the amount of a protein called VCAM1 in the blood increases with age…[The aging effects] were prevented when Yousef injected a compound that blocks VCAM1.
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A drug that protects people from the effects of old blood would be preferable to plasma injections, says Yousef. Should transfusions from young donors turn out to be effective, it would be difficult to scale this up as a treatment for all.
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