The quest to rejuvenate aging people with the blood of young donors has generated paying customers, captured the popular imagination, and, now, prompted a warning from the Food and Drug Administration.
The agency on Tuesday said in a statement that plasma infusions from young people provide “no proven clinical benefit” against normal aging, Alzheimer’s disease, or a host of other diseases — despite a surge in their promotion for those purposes. And, like any other plasma product, young-blood transfusions can pose risks, according to the FDA’s statement, which was attributed to Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, the director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
The FDA’s warning marked the sharpest rebuke to date of an industry that’s gained steam in the past few years even as mainstream scientists have urged caution.
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Why not use the aging patient’s own blood? Determine what factors are missing in old blood–related to triggering healing–could the ‘old’s blood plasma be manipulated to appear young to aging organs and thus precipitate mechanisms of healing. Such a reintroduction transfusion might be recognized by the patient’s systems more readily, messaging and instituting a natural regimen of healing; potentiations not found in so called ‘foreign plasma.
I am glad that you are covering this topic. In 1983, I was part of a kidney donor procedure, giving my kidney to my brother. He appeared to by dying and had been on dialysis for 5 years. It was wildly successful. He came back to health for 17 years. The thing of it is, had he blithely accepted medically recommended blood transfusions, he may have easily contracted HIV, the retrovirus not yet identified in the blood supply. Secondly, his immune response may have been so ramped up to various blood donors’ characteristics, he might not have been eligible for donation. How foolish people are! No different than Ponce de Deleon.