My class ends at 11:15 Tuesday, and due to the professor holding the first few classes via Zoom I only had one example of how quickly I could get from campus to my office. It was tight to make it by 11:30 so I chose to delay the meeting by 15 minutes.
Snow on the Healy, Alaska mountains heralds the approach of winter…meaning I have a long list of projects to accomplish before the snow flies (mostly related to the rentals). But in between these many projects I have been (mostly) keeping up with the aging news. There is so much recent news that I almost chose to lecture about “headlines”. But that was trumped by 2 fascinating porcine (pig) articles about plasma transfusion and also a kidney transplant. I will briefly talk about these two on Tuesday.
Lakshika is now doing her internship in Trincomalee (Sri Lanka), a place I was hoping to visit when Dilani’s (my accountant) husband was working there for a year. Perhaps I will get an opportunity to visit her while she is there. I don’t know if she will have a chance to join us, but she insists she still has time to work for us, so if anyone has any medical concerns they would like me to pass on to her I would be happy to do so.
It is approaching that time of month again. I will be finished with my UAF class (at least the class part of it; I will probably still be working on the final!) so we can resume having our meetings at 11:30, which seemed to fit most people’s schedule better than 10 am.
This time around the 2nd Tuesday of the month falls on December 13th, so I hope you aren’t superstitious! As usual I will send everyone signed up for the meetings the zoom link on the morning of the 13th.
A month ago I gave a lecture to the UAF Chemistry club about therapeutic plasma exchange. This is basically a wrap-up of all the things I have taught in class and/or talked about at the discussion group meetings. If you are interested you can check out the slides: Reversing aging: how the development of heterochronic parabiosis led to an aging treatment for humans. I have included a lot of notes on the slide info area to help you understand the slide.
At this meeting I have several topics I am going to very lightly touch on:
Vitamin D: I will briefly discuss a new paper about the benefits of vitamin D. I have been supplementing for nearly 3 years, and just took a test to make sure I am getting enough.
I got ahold of a epigenetic age report and thought it might interest you…especially since it is before & after a therapeutic plasma exchange
A short discussion on MiniCircle, a company developing disease cures using tiny bits of DNA organized in a circle.
HIV gene therapy
Follistatin therapy (one of the targets of this is sarcopenia)
Beating long COVID with exercise
I may have had long COVID (symptom: congestion), but noticed exercise made it better–so I ‘exercised it away’
This was kind of an interesting website about a guy who has developed a diet and how it appears to have reduced his biological age.
I have hired a Sri Lankan who will finish her internship to be a doctor in a year or two. I will give a brief introduction to her.
I will have to keep each topic very short, to keep it under 20 minutes. After my 20 minute lecture I will (as always) stop the recording and we can discuss anything you want until our zoom session runs out at 40 minutes.
Those of you who might have medical questions for our Sri Lankan ‘doctor’ let me know. I have hired her full time for this month, just to get her started. After that I am hoping to have enough work for her on a part time basis (20 hours a week). She will act as a conduit to specialists in Sri Lanka (for example, right now she is consulting with a heart specialist for a couple friends of mine who are having heart issues). I anticipate having her train on some of the more advanced ways of extending lifespan so she can advise us about them (e.g. using rapamycin).
Defeating Aging 