Key points from article :
I’m sitting in a padded recliner in a nondescript room of a multi-tenant medical building in San Francisco.
Treatment is overseen by Dobri Kiprov who runs the Apheresis Care Group.
Apheresis involves drawing blood from the body and then separating it into components.
My blood is flowing from my right arm through a tube into the dorm-fridge sized apheresis device.
My plasma—55 percent of my overall blood volume—is discarded.
Replaced with 95 % saline and 5 % albumin—a soluble protein produced in the liver—plus a few “proprietary ingredients.”
My reconstituted blood is then returned to my body through my left arm.
Would reducing the concentration of inflammatory cytokines in the bloodstream improve health outcomes?
Some approved drugs already neutralize some cytokines but commonly reduce immune competence.
TPE is FDA-approved for a broad range of disorders, but the FDA does not recognize ageing as a disease.
His wife, Song, also took part, and she has high inflammatory cytokine levels and has suffered recurring joint and tissue pain.
Song begins to feel different within hours. A decade of near-constant joint and tissue pain just… evaporates.
Gone too are the blues that often discolor her evenings.
The second night after treatment... as I lay my head down on the pillow, both my mind and body feel curiously quiet.
I feel… not exactly young, but younger.
I feel like I’ve been wearing gloves for the last decade and my hands are suddenly free.
A few weeks later, headaches and pain start to return.
Perhaps 20 percent of the benefits we felt at the peak of improvement are retained.
Another patient who underwent six sessions of TPE noted a diminution of benefit over time following each of his treatments, but less so with each one.
Series of treatments can potentially induce a reset of the immune system, leading to new homeostatic set-points
Lou Hawthorne participated in TPE as part of a study on aging by the Conboys and Kiprov.
There is growing evidence that removing inflammatory cytokines and other pathogenic proteins from blood could potentially rejuvenate tissues throughout our bodies.
