Israeli scientists find way to reverse cellular aging with century-old therapy

All living creatures wither and die eventually. There is no escape from death and taxes, they say. But that doesn’t mean aging can’t be slowed down. In fact, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel went further, showing in a new study that weekly hyperbaric oxygen sessions reversed a key process known to be involved in cellular aging.

The plugs on your chromosomes

Every day, every hour, every second, one of the most important events in life takes place in your body: cells are dividing. Right now, as you read this sentence, somewhere the cells are dividing, but every replication comes at a cost.

Telomeres cap and protect the ends of chromosomes from degradation, ensuring that our DNA is copied correctly as cells divide. Because of the way DNA replication is done in eukaryotic cells (that’s us!), These telomeres get shorter with each cell replication. At one point, the telomeres, which you can imagine as the hats of a lace, shorten to a critical limit. Just as a no-cup shoelace will disentangle and ruin tissue, severely shortened telomeres will trigger cell division dysfunction, also known as senescence. Over time, the buildup of these senescent cells is thought to be one of the main causes of aging.

Studies have linked shortened telomeres not only to aging but also to cancer. As such, the processes that regulate telomeres have been targeted by all kinds of experimental therapies meant to slow aging. Of particular interest is an enzyme called telomerase, which appears to have the ability to regenerate lost sections of the telomere, at least in tissues with high turnover of new cells, such as the intestinal lining. Some groups view telomerase gene therapy as primarily a form of regenerative medicine. However, these therapies have not been validated due to the small number of participants so far.

In Israel, researchers led by Shair Efrati, a doctor at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience, have taken a different path to improve telomere health. Their therapy involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber with pressure levels 1.5 to 3 times higher than average.

The procedure, known as hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), is by no means new. For over a century, it has been used to treat deep-sea divers suffering from decompression sickness or people who have been poisoned with carbon monoxide.

In a clinical trial, 35 healthy adults aged 64 and older spent 90 minutes in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which saturated their blood with oxygen. The participants repeated this experiment once a week for three months.

Blood samples were taken before treatment and during the test at monthly intervals, as well as two weeks after the end of the test. Strikingly, by the end of the trial, the participants’ telomeres were not only showing no shortening, they had actually lengthened by 20%. Participants also experienced a significant drop in the number of senescent helper T cells, showing that extended telomeres can reverse some aging, the authors reported in the review. Aging.

As a caveat, the main limitation of the study is its small sample size. In addition, the duration of the effect of therapy has not yet been determined in long-term follow-ups. But all things considered, these are promising results, showing that a relatively simple and readily available form of therapy could one day partially reverse aging – and possibly even extend our lifespan.

Until such therapy is confirmed, the best thing you can do to preserve your telomeres is to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly.