What got you interested in Immortality?

Glad I’m not a mouse :slight_smile:

Therefore, results from animal models, including the popular murine ones, are not always translatable to humans and conclusions should be made with caution. In addition, even well-controlled gut microbiota experiments using mouse models show important inter-study variations due to confounding factors in the experimental setup, such as mouse house origin, maternal effects, environmental conditions (food composition, light, stress factors, pathogen infection), genetic backgrounds and in the downstream analysis methods applied

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My argument is that if it doesn’t even help those little cancer factories in a lab and positive studies in humans are non-existent (the study by Professor Kennedy got shelved), how can we expect to get any benefit from it? The supplement is way too expensive to be justified.

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Depends on the source :slight_smile:

AKG does seem to do something in drosophilia and mice, whether it’s helpful in humans I agree that the evidence is weak but it does seem to have an effect on our favorite surrogates :slight_smile:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S156816372030372X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306456516300195
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413120304174

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the study by Professor Kennedy got shelved

If you’re talking about the study at Indiana University, if that one has been “shelved”, it’s likely not due to Kennedy but Ponce de Leon Health who funded the study (I think).

I would guess a scientist like Kennedy would want to publish a negative result of this sort. The only reason that I can see for him not to want to publish would be if there were gross errors in running the experiment. Kennedy has grad students and postdocs that need papers published, and even a negative result would help satisfy that need. (Also, it’s my understanding that in that experiment they discovered, post hoc, that the test subjects had unusually low epigenetic age, and were extra-healthy; so AKG had less of an effect than they were hoping to see, but Kennedy has said that within the group of people with average or above-average epigenetic age, they found AKG lowered their epigenetic age substantially).

I believe there is another study that is finishing up at the National University of Singapore, funded by the Singapore government.

My guess would be that both studies will be published eventually. It just takes time to write it all up. By comparison: as I recall, the big taurine study that came out a few years ago (on its deficiency being a driver of aging) took many years to complete. I had remembered it took 10 years, in fact, but couldn’t find any references for this (my memory could be in error). It might have been mentioned in an interview with some of the study authors.

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They could have released the study for anyone to analyze the subgroups.
My understanding is that if something actually lowers your epigenetic age (which is still vodoo science atm) it should delay cancer formation which has not been seen in mice trials.

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I asked this question to OpenAI’s o3 model:

Is it customary for university biomedical researchers to share research data before even issuing a preprint about the work, and if not then why not?

The short answer is:

No —outside of a few high-profile consortia and public-health emergencies, most university biomedical groups do not make their raw research data public before they have at least posted a preprint (and usually not until the accompanying paper is accepted or published). Funders and journals encourage openness, but their formal policies generally set the deadline for data release at or just after manuscript acceptance, so there is little structural incentive—and several disincentives—to post datasets earlier.

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