We've all seen some variation of this message: another hard sell for a product that promises the benefits of youth or exercise (or something else) in a pill. But what if legitimate researchers were actually developing drugs that could one day do what those sketchy late-night infomercials and YouTube videos have been claiming for years? That is exactly what scientists at leading universities across the U.S. are doing, by searching for factors circulating in our own blood that appear to confer the healthful benefits of youth and exercise. The first breakthrough came in 2014, when Tony Wyss-Coray and colleagues at Stanford University surgically connected the bloodstreams of an old mouse and a young mouse in a process called heterochronic parabiosis. As they reported in Nature Medicine, the procedure caused the old brain to function more like a younger one, generating more new brain cells and improving the ability to learn and remember.
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