[DIYbio] Re: Looking for partner or group for DIY TPE

Hi Raphael,

An epigenetic age test sounds pretty sophisticated. would love to learn more about that. Is it a standard lab test I can order?

I'm in New York City.  I learned a little more about doing this which opened up an unexpected avenue and more questions

1. Since the discovery and validation of young blood transfusion rejuvenation efficacy, studies like the recent UC Berkeley paper figured out that the effect comes less from gaining systemic factors in the young blood than from loosing detrimental factors in the old blood.

2. The key to the rejuvenating effect of the therapeutic plasma exchange TPE/plasmapheresis is eliminating 50% (less is Ok  though not optimal) of the older subject's plasma. Plasma constitutes around 60% of total blood volume, so removing 50% means 30% of total blood volume. For my size that equals about 3.4 liters!!. That would result in potentially catastrophic blood pressure drop so it has to be replaced by isotonic saline and it has to be done incrementally if you don;t have a continuous centrifugal separation apheresis machine which is very pricey.

3. One question I have is if the saline can be taken orally? would the body not absorb the solution just the same as intravenously albeit more slowly?

Thus doing this myself is out of the question. I would need at least one other well-trained person present. in looking around  for labs or service providers that offer TPE I stumbled upon blood donation. When you dontse blood nowadays you get choose the type of donation: Whole blood, RBC only, Plasma, or platelet. Well sure enough the way the blood bank takes a plasma donation is by using plasmapheresis, ha! So by donating plasma you get a rejuvenation treatment for free.  The main drawback is that they only take a pint of plasma which is about half of the optimal 50%.  So I am scheduled to do this early next week.