Fight Aging!

The history of transcranial electromagnetic treatments suggests that there is something interesting there to be found, but also that it is challenging to discover the right parameters of treatment that can produce meaningful benefits in at least some patients. There is a very large space of possibilities to explore in terms of amplitude, frequency, length and timing of treatment, and so on, in an environment in which the interactions between electromagnetic fields and cell behavior are poorly understood at best.

In today's open access paper, a few sizable claims are made on the basis of small long-term trials in humans, but it is worth balancing that against the history of this field and the point that small trial success quite often fails to translate to large trial success. Skepticism and a wait and see attitude are probably justified. Still, might it be possible to reliably dial down the chronic inflammation of aging given the right approach to electromagnetic treatments? That would be a valuable achievement if so.

More generally, the use of electromagnetism as an approach to induce cells to change their behavior for the better is greatly understudied and underdeveloped in comparison to the small molecule approach. That doesn't mean that it won't work given far greater investment and the time taken to develop a far greater understanding of mechanisms and interactions. Interesting results are published in the literature for wound healing, neurodegeneration, and so forth, enough to show potential. This is nonetheless a part of the medical research and development communities still in search of mainstream legitimacy and the first widely accepted applications.

Transcranial Electromagnetic Wave Treatment: A Fountain of Healthy Longevity?

There is substantial evidence that most diseases in older age involve inflammation in the brain and/or body due to a chronic over-activation of pro-inflammatory cytokines over anti-inflammatory cytokines ("inflammaging"). By contrast, individuals in young adulthood and middle age have an immune system balanced in these two components, as do many centenarians (100+ years), effectively providing immune protection from environmental and body insults. We have therefore proposed that a gerotherapeutic that can "rebalance" pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines in aged individuals will reduce the risk or severity of age-related diseases and increase healthy longevity. This perspectives paper provides clinical evidence that such a "rejuvenating" gerotherapeutic is not a drug, but rather a bioengineered medical device that provides Transcranial Electromagnetic Wave Treatment (TEMT), the MemorEM. In that regard, TEMT administration to aged/diseased individuals could be comparable to them receiving continual blood infusions from young adult or middle-aged individuals who have a balanced (youthful) immune system in their blood-the result being much reduced systemic inflammation and increased longevity through TEMT.

The results presented, and conclusions reached in this paper are based on our three published clinical papers involving the same mild/moderate Alzheimer's disease subjects given TEMT for a period of 30 months and evaluated at 2 months, and 14-31 months into that period. At 2 months into treatment, analysis of 11 cytokines in blood and 7 cytokines in brain/CSF revealed an extraordinarily consistent ability of TEMT to "rebalance" the largely pro-inflammatory status of the immune system in these subjects. Specifically, if a given cytokine's level was high in blood plasma or cerebrospinal fluid, TEMT reduced its levels to normal aged individuals, and vice versa if they were low. The mechanism for blood rebalancing of cytokines by TEMT appears to involve the unique ability of red blood cells to concentrate cytokines and to respond to electromagnetic waves by increasing their membrane fluidity to rebalance plasma cytokines with an appropriate flux of cytokines in or out across their membranes. We believe that the same rebalancing of blood/plasma cytokines by TEMT will occur in both normal aged and age-diseased individuals. This is because those cytokine levels in individual subjects that were near normal levels at baseline did not show a TEMT-induced change in their levels thereafter.