Could a jab of young blood age-proof your brain?

IF You want to keep your brain young and sharp — and who doesn’t — what should you feed it? I’ve written plenty of times before about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in fruit, veg, oily fish, olive oil and nuts — and now yet another study, published a fortnight ago, has found that people who stick closely to it have fewer of the amyloid plaques and tau tangles in their brains that are linked to Alzheimer’s disease, than those who don’t.

But how about branching out and trying something very different — what about allowing your brain to feast on nutrients taken from someone else’s blood?

Although it is controversial, there is mounting evidence of the benefits that come from being infused with blood from young people, and I have recently seen some of those benefits first hand.

Human blood is extraordinary stuff. It is packed with cells that sustain, protect and regenerate our bodies.

Blood transfusions from healthy donors have saved millions of lives and now new research suggests that injections of young blood in particular have the potential to repair our ageing brains.

The idea that blood has magical properties is hardly new. In Roman times the sick, particularly those with epilepsy, were encouraged to go to gladiatorial combats to try and drink the blood of a freshly killed gladiator.

And there is, of course, the legend of Count dracula, who feeds on human blood and transforms himself from a little old man with white hair into a darkhaired super athlete. Surprisingly enough, there does seem to be some science in this.

Studies with mice have shown that if you infuse an old mouse with blood taken from a young mouse, this makes their bodies stronger and their brains younger: they run for longer on a treadmill, do better in mazes and are able to remember their way to food much faster than they could before the blood transfusion.

Spookily, the reverse is also true. Transfuse blood from an old mouse into a young mouse and they become weaker and show signs of early memory loss.

Tech billionaires in the u.S. have leapt on these findings and have been funding research into what it is about young blood that’s producing these changes. And, understandably, that worries a lot of people.

Last summer, when I was in the u.S. filming for a series on ageing, I saw a TV drama called Blood Boy which imagines a future where billionaires keep handsome young men — ‘transfusion associates’ — on hand for regular infusions of anti-ageing blood.

Is it a grotesque idea? Certainly. But on that same trip I also saw some of the potential benefits of transfusions of young blood, when used in a medical context, when I met Terri, a 63-year-old Californian with Parkinson’s disease.

A few years ago she took part in a trial, run by Stanford university, where Parkinson’s patients had twice weekly transfusions of plasma (the liquid part of your blood) donated by young volunteers, i.e. under 30 years old.

It was only a small study (with 15 participants), run over eight weeks, to see if doing regular transfusions is safe enough to justify a bigger trial, but even so it led to improvements in speech and a boost in mental health.

As Terri told me: ‘I felt more energised afterwards. I felt more normal, back to myself. not the Parkinson’s self, but my old self. So that, to me, was wonderful.’

other studies are now looking at whether transfusing young plasma can help with other common brain diseases, such as dementia.

The preferred donors in these trials are often men under 30, because their stem cells (master cells that can turn into a range of other cells) are more potent — and when it comes to things like bone marrow transplant this can lead to better clinical outcomes.

Giving regular transfusions of young blood to older people is clearly not going to be practical, let alone ethical. So the search is on to identify and replicate the beneficial components without needing to use actual blood.

A few weeks ago researchers at Harvard university took a big step forward — revealing they’d identified many of the key genes that get switched on, or off, after a plasma transfusion.

The genes they identified are important for regulating stress, injury and inflammation, particularly in the brain, so it looks like the benefits of the transfusions come from altering these genes.

And that fits in with the results of another study, published in February by u.S. scientists, which showed that when mice are given an inflammatory drug, commonly given to people with arthritis, this helps regenerate their blood-producing cells.

So there is lots of promising research under way, though there is still some way to go before we really understand what young blood is doing to our brains.

In the meantime, I have warned my kids that I may come to them and ask for some of their plasma when I start to get really doddery. Between the four of them, they should be able to manage.