Hey there! Welcome to Life Noggin!

As you humans age, your body goes through lots of  changes and one of those changes is wrinkled skin.

People spend a lot of money to try to  stop or reverse this process. Worldwide,  

over $60 billion are spent on  anti-wrinkle skin care products.

But the cause of wrinkles isn't just skin deep.  

It's the same process that causes  your arteries to stiffen as you age,  

which could cause serious health problems,  like heart disease or kidney damage.

Yeah these things are linked and we might be  able to prevent both of them. Let me dive deeper!

When your heart beats, artery walls expand and  contract. This happens with the help of proteins,  

or long chain-like molecules,  that form a stretchy web-like  

structure around the walls. This  is called the extracellular matrix.

But sometimes, blood sugar  molecules will break open,  

revealing their sticky ends. And every once in a  while, these ends will stick to the proteins in  

the extracellular matrix and form a rigid  bridge between them called a cross-link.

Eventually, as more and more sugar molecules  create cross-links, the once stretchy web  

becomes stiff, making it difficult to expand and  contract with each heartbeat. This takes away a  

vital cushion for the brain and the kidney  against the powerful surge of the pulse,  

and also forces the heart to work harder,  leading to illnesses like heart disease.

It also makes your skin less elastic  and structured, making it harder for  

it to snap back into its original  shape, which results in wrinkles.

So, to fix this problem, we need to somehow  break apart those hard, sugary cross-links.

Scientists have been looking for ways to  do this and they believe that one promising  

avenue is a molecule called glucosepane, which  is one of the products of those crosslinks.

As you age, the amount of glucosepane in  your extra-cellular matrix increases.,  

And studies have found that it causes stiffness  in tissues and dysfunction in blood vessels.

But this molecule is big and complex, which  makes it really hard to break apart with the  

simple chemicals used in medicines. Instead,  researchers have been looking for an enzyme,  

which is a molecule that  speeds up chemical reactions.

One group found some of these in bacteria that are  capable of breaking apart glucosepane cross-links.  

While more testing is still needed, their work  could pave the way for a future treatment.

Way less wrinkles and yeah your heart is going  to work the way it should for longer! I'd say  

that's a win-win! So, tell me, are you afraid of  getting older? Are you worried about wrinkles or  

age-related diseases or are you not really phased  by aging? Let's start a healthy discussion down  

in the comments! If you're interested in  learning more about the awesome Tech and  

science I mentioned in this video, check  out our sponsor and good friends over at  

the SENS Research Foundation! Click the first  link in the description! Click here to watch  

this video that we did on speeding up human  evolution or click here to watch this video!

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description! As always my name is blocko this has  been life Noggin don't forget to keep on thinking!