Hello All,
Maybe there are health gains to be had from blood packing (blood draw and replace later) not just in quantitiy of blood cells - HCT - but quality of blood cells, younger ones that may have greater oxygen transportation qualities and healing properties than old ones.
Or sleeping in a hypoxic tent (legal) and getting more new red blood cells.
If you are going to refrigerate your blood for transfusion later - is young blood (perhaps from a younger fetal twin) better than old blood?
Actually talking about two kinds of young blood here - with two different experiments - blood from a young donor and blood cells in an older human that have been culled of cells older than 40 days.
For this discussion I am picking 40 days because that is when (in years) male humans’ endurance times start to degrade … 
Using 68 to 120 days as an average life span for a red blood cell would a diaylsis procedure that culled all the older blood cells (Say over 40 days old) and replaced them with younger cells harvested earlier provide any improvements in muscle performance and healing?
What methods are avialable to determine the age of blood cells? Can they be magnetically culled?
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http://longevity.stanford.edu/...icine/tobeyoungagain
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Reprinted, with permission, from Stanford Medicine, Spring 2008. For the original article, click here
Excerpts:
By the time Rando crosses the finish line of the Boston marathon, he will have burned several pounds of fat for energy and lost more than two pints of water. Think of him on the afternoon of April 21. Blisters will likely be flourishing on his feet or might have already lived out their short, painful life spans. Some toenails might be starting the slow process of bidding adieu to their respective toes.
Underneath the sweat and blisters, Rando’s muscles will have taken a less visible beating. Individual muscle fibers, like so many strands of microscopic hair making up the bulky muscle, will have burst and leaked their contents into the surrounding tissue. A certain trepidation in the face of stairs over the next few days will be the outer sign of this internal damage.
That damage will repair itself in a seemingly miraculous process throughout the next month. Stem cells huddled quietly in the various tissues will heed the call of the injured cells, dividing to form two new cells: One will become a replacement stem cell and one will repair the tissue. In the case of muscle, those stem cells are known as satellite cells for their position frozen in orbit around bundles of muscle fibers.
The problem for Rando is that, at 50, his satellite cells aren’t what they used to be.
Or, to be more precise, the satellite cells might be OK, but the old muscle is less able to prod the satellite cells to divide or to guide the replacement cell to form muscle. That communication failure between the muscle and the satellite cell is one reason Rando and all the other runners of a certain age heal more slowly than their youthful competitors.
Rando knows this problem better than anyone, as an athlete experiencing lingering muscle pain and as a scientist who studies muscle satellite cells.
What Rando, MD, PhD, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences, has learned is that, at least in mice, older animals’ satellite cells are less likely to repair damaged muscles. When those cells do rise to the occasion, they have a tendency to replace the injured muscle not with a functional new muscle fiber but with fibrous connective tissue instead. Given that data, it’s not surprising that older people tend to have muscles filled with fibrous connective tissue rather than useful muscle. That’s one reason people get weaker with age.
Rando imagines a future five or 10 years from now in which this research leads to ways of healing tissues for short durations of time. The idea is that a short dose of a localized drug would kick the stem cells into gear temporarily, just long enough to heal an injury but not long enough to tempt disease. After a surgery, for example, an injection of something that gives those skin stem cells a boost could help an elderly aunt heal more quickly and get out of the hospital.
This type of treatment would be most likely to succeed in tissues normally maintained by stem cells. So skin and blood, which stem cells constantly regenerate in young people, would make good candidates. But brain and heart would be poor candidates — since not even young people’s stem cells do much to repair these tissues.
As for muscle, although a stem cell-based treatment could eventually work, that day is too far off to help Rando recover from a demanding race. For the foreseeable future, he and other runners will be relying on ice, ibuprofen and time to heal their injuries.
For Rando’s work, the group took advantage of a research trick developed by colleagues in the lab of Irving Weissman, MD, who directs Stanford’s stem cell institute. They surgically connected the blood supply of an older mouse and a younger mouse, then damaged the muscle of the older mouse. Those older satellite cells bathed in blood from the younger mouse were able to repair the muscle injury. The muscles of old mice with no access to young blood didn’t heal as quickly.
But don’t go looking for a hit of young blood to complement your next Botox injection. Not only is the blood unavailable, Rando doubts a single transfusion would do much good.
Nor should those in most urgent need of blood — surgery patients or trauma victims — worry about their blood donor’s age. The red blood cells and platelets that those patients need are equally effective from people of any age, according to Susan Galel, MD, associate professor of pathology at the School of Medicine and associate medical director of the Stanford Blood Center.
Amy Wagers, PhD, a co-author of Rando’s 2005 Nature paper and a former Stanford postdoc, says a hit of some good stuff in that younger blood could beat the blood itself at keeping stem cells spry. “If it is something in the blood serum, you could isolate that and it could be therapeutically useful,” says Wagers, now on Harvard’s faculty.
What do you think?
Cheers,
Neal