Recently on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25163220

>The subjects were placed in a pressurised chamber and given pure oxygen for 90 minutes a day, five days a week for three months.

>It is understood that instead the effects were the result of the pressurised chamber inducing a state of hypoxia, or oxygen shortage, which caused the cell regeneration.

This article is garbage. What they are reporting makes no sense. Putting people in a HYPERbaric oxygen chamber shouldn't make them HYPOxic, which is what they are suggesting causes the age-reversing effect.

This fundamental misunderstanding gives me little faith they have in any way correctly interpreted and reported on the study.

Were there any tangible benefits observed? Did the participants' heath quantifiably improve in any way? This kind of observation is missing from the article; if the expected benefits of telomere length is increased health and longevity, does the lack of such result suggest that they are less involved in aging than we think?

Telomeres are intentionally shortened by the body, a process which is no doubt favored by evolution. While we don't know why for sure, it is entirely possible that telomere shortening actually lengthens life.

As telomeres become shorter, cell division becomes slower and metabolism decreases. This means that an older person's cells will reproduce at a slower rate than a younger person's in general. If we suppose that every cell division poses an equal chance at producing a life threatening cancer, then slower cell reproduction at a higher age would likely be beneficial.

Of course this is just speculation, but likely there is _some_ health benefit to telomere shortening otherwise we would not have evolved to do it.

Junk article. It's certainly not a "holy grail"...the study just measured telomere length after HBOT. Even meditation has been shown to reduce telomere length. It certainly didn't "reverse human aging".

HN people: please stop posting these junk newspaper articles that completely misrepresent the science.

> chamber inducing a state of hypoxia, or oxygen shortage, which caused the cell regeneration.

Might actually be related to life extension through calorie restriction in this regard. This paper re calories restriction mentions:

> caloric restriction improves whole body energy efficiency by inducing the biogenesis of mitochondria that utilize less oxygen and produce less reactive oxygen species (ROS). https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Starving the body of oxygen might trigger some of the same genetic pathways as starving it of food, basically.

Before anyone goes too nuts with this, keep in mind that your body is constantly evolving throughout your life via epigenetic suppression of certain genes. As you expose yourself to new bodily stresseors (regular exposure to a much more reactive atmosphere than normal) you may not be turning "back" aging, but rather reactivating old eukaryotic coping mechanisms evolved long ago, but not employed regularly since circumstances have changed. If you further cease to expose yourself to that stressor, your body will slowly shift away from utilizing those metabolic pathways back to something more efficient given the set of stressors in your typical environment.

Higher concentrations of oxygen from your respiratory system would likely signal the need in your entire body to upregulate cell division, due to oxidative stress both internal and external. It could also kick in metabolic processes that are not as efficient is substantially lower lower O2 partial pressure environments.

Nevermind the fire hazard. Pro-Tip: With enough 02 around, and nothing else to get in the way, everything burns with comparatively little inducement to do so.

Light reading https://www.eiga.eu/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=208&token=c...

https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1448.pdf

There were a few other good searches I did long ago for another random walk of whimsy, but I seem to have lost track of them. I'll see if I can find them again.

I eagerly await the coming flood of DIY oxygen chamber tutorials. Hopefully no one gets hurt.

FWIW: high concentration O2 is known to be toxic in other ways. It causes lung inflamation at least (oxygen is, after all, highly reactive and tends to break up lots of different molecules). I think there's a real possibility that this does more harm than good.

Rough heuristic: if it’s a “science” article from the Independent, it’s probably bullshit.

Shouldn't longer telomeres increase the likelihood of cancer?

I think you're assuming evolution is smarter than it is. Telomeres make sense as an anti-cancer mechanism by making it less likely that cells replicate infinitely. The fact they also put a hard limit on age is not a problem as long as genetic carriers manage to reproduce.

"In the large majority of cancer cells, telomere length is maintained by telomerase."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4915101/

My guess is that the shortening of telomeres—and the presumed aging effects—is evolutionarily beneficial because it sets an expiration date on your life. If people could live forever they may prohibit other younger and genetically different people from reproducing and introducing variety in the gene pool.

Certainly having wealthier people live forever now would be bad from a social perspective. Time is really the biggest factor in acquiring wealth and influence. If that goes unchecked then that power can become out of control. Realistically I dont think it was that different thousands of years ago.

Seems like pure speculation. There are a thousand different mechanisms that would explain it and would not mean "there is some health benefit". Is there a health benefit of white hair? Of wrinkles? Of ...?

Quite the opposite seems true in fact. Evolution tries make us be on our peak at the reproductive age, and a lot of that happens after is a byproduct/consequence of this, not just for health benefits. Most (all?) of the biological "health indicators" decline after this peak age.

There's a theory that setting an expiration on cellular division can help prevent cancer.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11909679/