The key to eternal youth? WORMS!

But if you can’t stomach that idea, here are my tips proven to work . . .

NExT month, I am going to be 64. Although I’m in reasonable shape, I know that as I get older, I’m at increased risk of a whole range of illnesses, including heart disease, dementia, cancer and, of course, more vulnerable to dying from infectious diseases such as Covid-19.

For despite what the beauty industry promises, ageing is inevitable.

But what if you could reduce your risk of some of those age-related illnesses by deliberately infecting yourself with bloodsucking parasites? Would you?

That is a question posed by a fascinating new scientific paper, with the compelling title ‘Gross ways to live long’, written by academics from the Institute of Healthy Ageing, based at University College London.

As they point out, what many of the diseases associated with ageing have in common is ‘inflammaging’, a type of chronic inflammation that increases as we get older. It occurs because our immune system begins to mount a low-level attack against our heart, brain and other organs, which then fall apart earlier than they should.

The academics suggest the main trigger of inflammaging is an imbalance in the mix of microbes in our gut, and in particular, the absence of ‘Old Friends’.

Like us, our immune system comes into the world with an awful lot to learn. One of the things it needs to be quickly taught is what’s dangerous and must be fought, and what’s OK and should be left alone. In the past, our immune system was taught how to behave by Old Friends, the ‘good’ microbes that live in our guts and which have evolved with us over millions of years.

SADLY, thanks to the overuse of antibiotics and a diet of highly processed foods, our guts are no longer packed with these Old Friends, but have far more ‘bad’ microbes, encouraging lots of inflammaging.

As well as our Old Friends, in recent times we’ve also killed off gut parasites such as hookworm (thanks, not least, to improved sanitation). This is a common type of worm found in soil worldwide.

They start out as larvae and can grow up to around half an inch in length once they are inside you and live in your guts for up to ten years.

You might think good riddance, but hookworms, like the Old Friends, used to play an important part in controlling and educating our immune system.

Professor David Pritchard, a specialist in parasite immunology at Nottingham University, has been studying hookworms for decades. He is so dedicated to his work that he once deliberately infected himself with them, as I discovered when I made a TV series on self-experimenters.

He put hookworm larvae on a plaster, then put the plaster on his skin. The larvae burrowed through his skin, into his blood and eventually into his gut, where they latched on and began to feed.

‘They cause an intense itching when they start to burrow,’ he told me, ‘and then you feel nothing until they start feeding in your gut.’

The interesting thing about hookworms is that to ensure their own survival, they produce chemicals that can selectively switch off parts of our immune system. When I last saw David, he and Professor Cris Constantinescu, a neurologist at Nottingham University, were planning to use the same technique to deliberately infect patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) with hookworms.

One of the distressing things about MS is the progressive muscle weakness caused by the immune system mistakenly attacking the insulation around the nerves. But would a worm infestation help dial this down? The answer, it seems, is yes. In results published recently in the journal JAMA Neurology, 71 patients with relapsing remitting MS (the most common version) were given the hookworm plaster or a placebo plaster.

Nine months later, less than half the patients infected with hookworms showed signs of new nerve damage, while three quarters of the placebo group did. Tests showed that the hookworm group had increased levels of a type of white blood cell that helps keep the immune system under control, and which is often reduced or absent in MS patients.

The results of this study were so promising that further trials, using larger hookworm doses, are now being planned.

There is also evidence that infecting patients with hookworms can help people with coeliac disease, an autoimmune disease which affects the bowels, while studies have also shown that infecting mice with hookworms, and other parasitic worms, can improve a whole range of illnesses, from heart disease to cancer.

The trouble is not many of us are going to want to act as hosts to blood-sucking parasites. So it was encouraging to see a study, published last year by researchers from Glasgow University, where they injected mice with a protein called ES-62, produced by parasitic worms, which has powerful anti-inflammatory effects.

The mice given daily injections of this protein were healthier and lived, on average 12 per cent longer than a control group. As the researchers point out, this discovery could lead to the development of drugs to improve healthy ageing and even increase lifespan.

While you are waiting for that to happen, you might like to know that you don’t have to get close to worms: other proven ways to reduce inflammaging include keeping to a healthy weight, doing regular exercise and eating a Mediterranean diet, rich in oily fish, olive oil and legumes.

That is what I am doing and, so far, it seems to be working.