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On 10 September 2018, newspapers such as the UK's Sun and the New York Post published the same story under the headline Young Blood Could Be the Secret to Long-lasting Health: Study -- a headline which implied that a recently published scientific study had made a significant development in the field of medicinal blood drinking. The story, whose virality was ensured by an accompanying picture of bloody vampire teeth, opened with these claims: This reporting has several things wrong with it right off the bat. First, nobody is advocating for the drinking of blood — the idea as posited would be to inject it via transfusion. Second, the study referenced by the Post and the Sun, authored by geneticist Linda Partridge, did not itself investigate blood transfusions for human longevity purposes but rather included a discussion of blood transfusions in animal studies as part of a larger review of the state of the longevity and aging fields. Third, blood factors refer to specific components of blood, not to blood as a whole. Partridge’s paper referenced one specific animal study to conclude that Blood factors obtained from young individuals [can] improve late-life health in animals. The animal study Pardridge cited, titled Human umbilical cord plasma proteins revitalize hippocampal function in aged mice and published in Nature in 2017, suggested that the injection of a specific component of human blood derived from human umbilical cords could prevent cognitive decline in mice, an important finding that could have relevance for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's: To be clear, the mice used in this study were not drinking blood: Additionally, these mice were not simply injected with a syringe of raw blood, but rather with purified versions that isolated specific chemicals from the blood: In her paper, Partridge made it clear that while such work was interesting, much work would need to be done to assess the viability of such a treatment in humans, arguing that application to humans will require better biomarkers of disease risk and responses to interventions, closer alignment of work in animals and humans, and increased use of electronic health records, biobank resources and cohort studies. Not to be dissuaded by this vitally important caveat, the Post and Sun articles attempted to muddy the waters further by linking the paper written by Partridge to the controversial, unpublished, and unrelated work of the Peter Thiel-backed company Ambrosia LLC, suggesting that Partridge’s work is part of Theil’s effort to inject humans with young blood to extend health and longevity: First, Ambrosia LLC did not back Partridge's study in any way. Via email, Partridge told us her study was not funded or connected to the Thiel-backed startup. Second, the results the Post and Sun story referenced with respect to Ambrosia were not taken from any actual published study, but from a talk the founder of Ambrosia gave at a TechCrunch conference in 2016. As such, it cannot be critically evaluated as scientific development at this time. The clinical trial run by Ambrosia LLC, which cost $8,000 to join, has been controversial in the scientific community for several reasons, most notably the fact that the study design lacked a control group. Arne Akbar, an immunologist at the University College London, argued to New Scientist in 2017 that There is no telling what [results come] down to the placebo effect. Derek Lowe, in a blog post for the Science Translational Medicine's In The Pipeline blog, expressed concerns about the demographics of the clinical trial, which he described as shady: Regardless of the merits of Ambrosia's efforts, no study has concluded that drinking a young person’s blood provides anti-aging health benefits. As such, we rank the claim false.
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