>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.
> Every 20 minutes, the participants were asked to remove their masks for five minutes, bringing their oxygen back to normal levels. However, during this period, researchers saw that fluctuations in the free oxygen concentration were interpreted at the cellular level as a lack of oxygen – rather than interpreting the absolute level of oxygen.
> In other words, repeated intermittent hyperoxic (increased oxygen level) exposures induced many of the mediators and cellular mechanisms that are usually induced during hypoxia (decreased oxygen levels) – something Efrati explained is called the hyperoxic-hypoxic paradox. “The oxygen fluctuation we generated is what is important,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “During this process, a state of oxygen shortage resulted, which caused cell regeneration.”
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-scientists-say-...
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.
"In the large majority of cancer cells, telomere length is maintained by telomerase."
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.
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.
HN people: please stop posting these junk newspaper articles that completely misrepresent the science.
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.
I thought the free radical/antioxidant stuff was done with?
Meanwhile SIRT1 has been proven to be life extending via genetically engineering mice to have it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6291425/
So the claim of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3901353/ that this is just shifting damage from one type of damage to another and can't prolong life doesn't seem to hold water.
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.
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.
It's a known thing in diving planning, here's a wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
Now, I'm sure these chambers aren't at those pressures. But everything is likely linear, and the thing they're "curing" is literally what we currently consider to be the normal baseline! Even a very small effect will swamp whatever longevity benefits they're seeing are.
