Young blood transfusions

Background

Young blood is hypothesized to have unidentified factors that may decrease, delay, or reverse aging processes.

Research Idea

We transfuse blood all the time. If there is a way to track the age of the blood donor (likely), then we could enroll patients who receive blood transfusions into a clinical trial to see if they have better outcomes when the blood is from a younger donor? There are all sorts of other endpoints you could look at: markers of cellular age (telomere length? epigenetic markers?), inflammatory markers, 30-day mortality, recurrence free survival in cancer patients, VO2 max pre- and post- transfusion, exercise tolerance, sleep quality, energy levels, cognitive functioning. Since we also fractionate the blood products, it may help narrow down whether the implicated factors are in plasma, cryoprecipitate, or in cellular components like RBCs or platelets.