Lately I have been reading up more about the current state of the art in the anti-aging research and from that I started to develop the strong belief that in order to cure Parkinson’s disease, we need to be looking at the aging process. Diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimer are old age disease. If you want to get rid of them, you have to reverse the damage that caused it … which is the damage by aging. If you want to prevent these diseases, you need to prevent damage from aging also.
This anti-aging research is actually quite fascinating and I think many of the results that are coming out of that research could help or even cure PD but at the same time I also noticed that these compounds aren’t really being tested as they should on PD. Take for example, aspirin. It is known that aspirin has a life extending effect. At the same time it reduces inflammation. Inflammation is one of the driving factors behind PD disease progression. So I did a search online:
The original paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143447
I wonder why PD patients are not getting aspirine prescribed already. It is an old cheap drug. But no, for some reason it is not being considered a treatment. However, for anxiety PD patients are prescribed the most horrible addictive meds with terrible side effects.
Now, lets look further. People with PD have problems with autophagy. At least those with the GBA mutation do. So during my investigation of anti-aging research I found out about this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049515003649
NAD has an impact on this process. Moreover, it knows that NAD decline during aging decreases SIRTUIN activity. The whole point of SIRTUIN activation is to mimic caloric restriction. Caloric restriction puts your body in a state of stress that triggers the repair mechanisms in your body going from DNA repair to autophagy. With other words, NAD triggers autophagy. PD patients with a GBA mutation lack autophagy in their lysosomes because of the enzymes in this process has some defect (too small). This lack of autophagy is believed to give rise to clumped alpha-synuclein which at his turn causes neuronal death in PD.
I am certainly not an expert. I am not an expert in Parkinson’s disease nor am I an expert in anti-aging. I am learning more about it everyday. But I think there is enough evidence to say that both aspirin and a NAD precursor should be tested thoroughly in clinical trials for PD patients. What makes things even worse is that it is not like these things are new. There have been studies on aspirin and life extension that go back several decades. Are you telling me that in all these decades nobody was able to come up with the fact that since aspirine is anti-inflammatory and inflammation is a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases, that aspirine might actually be helpfull and/or prevent these diseases ?
I can only get very mad when finding these things out. Think about all the failed clinical experiments on Alzheimer because the researchers don’t want to give up their false belief that beta amyloid is the culprit. Millions and maybe evem billions have been thrown in the garbage bin. If only 0.001 % of that money was used to test the effect of Aspirin then we would already know if Aspirin would prevent and/or help AD patients. That’s why I stopped funding medical research.
However, I did find something new to support … anti-aging research. At least that part of research is not poisoned by greed and big pharmas (yet).