Scientists make breakthrough in anti-aging treatment and reverse signs of ageing in human cells

While ageing is a natural process, we humans have always fought against it.

And now a group of scientists from Israel have managed to actually reverse the process of ageing in what is being hailed as 'breakthrough research'. The adult blood cells that went through the therapy using oxygen were found to be growing younger.

The project was undertaken by scientists of the Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center and the findings have been published in Aging magazine on 18 November.

What the team did was to treat the cells in a pressure chamber with high-pressure oxygen. They were able to not only halt the ageing process but reverse two major processes associated with ageing and its illnesses. The first one was the shortening of telomeres (cap-like structures present in chromosomes) and the other was an accumulation of old and malfunctioning cells in the body.

Professor Shai Efrati of TAU led the research on hyperbaric oxygen treatments (HBOT) in healthy ageing adults. As Al Jazeera reports, about 35 adult human beings who are more than 64 years old were part of the study. All of them were given HBOT for 90 minutes a day, five times a week for three months.

In just three months, as per the study, the physical changes were “equivalent to how the participants’ bodies were at the cellular level 25 years earlier”. Also the subjects were found to have improved attention, information processing speed and executive functions. “Focusing on immune cells containing DNA obtained from the participants’ blood, the study discovered a lengthening of up to 38 per cent of the telomeres, as well as a decrease of up to 37 per cent in the presence of senescent cells,” said a press statement.

“Today telomere shortening is considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of the biology of ageing,” said professor Efrati while speaking on the importance of the recent research. He said that researchers around the world have been trying to develop “interventions” that can lead to telomere elongation and the HBOT protocol has managed to do that.

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