As a neuroscientist, when you said “video of person injecting it” and you were talking about a product which putatively contains neurotrophic factors like BDNF....
My immeduate thought was “Whoa! That is some seriously hardcore biohacking! Drilling a hole in your own skull to inject BDNF straight into your brain?! Gotta respect the courage, while doubting the wisdom.”
Then of course I was immediately let down upon realizing that the person was just injecting it into their arm. Booooring.
In the case of Bryan Johnson he injected it in his glute. Others inject in the thigh (there’s a how-to video about this on YouTube). Apparently some biohackers online think that by injecting in the shoulder more will reach the brain, because the shoulder is closer to the head, according to a podcast I listened to LOL (the podcaster agreed this made a lot of sense).
To be fair, as Seth Redmore mentions in his comment, some signalling proteins do get actively moved across the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). I don’t expect you to have much luck with significantly affecting brain BDNF levels via peripheral injection but… it’s not a completely black and white case, because few things in biology are. Of course, if you could isolate just the BDNF fraction and inject a large quantity, then a low BBB-crossing rate would still amount to a meaningful effect.
The Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) isn’t perfect, stuff leaks from time to time. You can deliberately (and very unwisely!) temporarily degrade the BBB with certain chemicals. I’ve assisted in studies taking advantage of this fact to get things into rat brains that otherwise would be restricted by the BBB. But, you can kill or permanently cripple yourself doing that, so I really don’t recommend it.
As a neuroscientist, when you said “video of person injecting it” and you were talking about a product which putatively contains neurotrophic factors like BDNF....
My immeduate thought was “Whoa! That is some seriously hardcore biohacking! Drilling a hole in your own skull to inject BDNF straight into your brain?! Gotta respect the courage, while doubting the wisdom.”
Then of course I was immediately let down upon realizing that the person was just injecting it into their arm. Booooring.
Yeah, total quackery.
In the case of Bryan Johnson he injected it in his glute. Others inject in the thigh (there’s a how-to video about this on YouTube). Apparently some biohackers online think that by injecting in the shoulder more will reach the brain, because the shoulder is closer to the head, according to a podcast I listened to LOL (the podcaster agreed this made a lot of sense).
To be fair, as Seth Redmore mentions in his comment, some signalling proteins do get actively moved across the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). I don’t expect you to have much luck with significantly affecting brain BDNF levels via peripheral injection but… it’s not a completely black and white case, because few things in biology are. Of course, if you could isolate just the BDNF fraction and inject a large quantity, then a low BBB-crossing rate would still amount to a meaningful effect.
The Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) isn’t perfect, stuff leaks from time to time. You can deliberately (and very unwisely!) temporarily degrade the BBB with certain chemicals. I’ve assisted in studies taking advantage of this fact to get things into rat brains that otherwise would be restricted by the BBB. But, you can kill or permanently cripple yourself doing that, so I really don’t recommend it.