www.airpt.org

The Italian Association for Research into Tissue Plasticity

studies the capability, inherent in the tissues of the human body, to change shape during their life-span or when subjected to external stimuli.
Plasticity enables biological tissues to adapt to new environmental stimuli, and is a fundamental requirement for survival.

The Physical World and Plasticity

The plastic processes of retraction and extension are not, however, the exclusive province of the human body. Rather they belong to space-time as a whole. Thus plasticity not only represents a characteristic of the energy content of the body-mind, but permeates the entire physical world.

Plasticity of the Body-Mind

With regard to the human body, plasticity may be considered an index to measure well-being and intellectual potential. Depending on the different tissues and states of matter that it represents on different occasions, it expresses itself through different values. It can be measured in bits when it defines brain potential (calculation capability or memory power) or in natural numbers if it identifies haemodynamic values or cephalometric ratios.

Anti-Ageing Techniques

At our conferences, plasticity is explained in its different implications that link it to changes in body shape and to physiological and pathological processes of the Body-Mind.

Basic Scientific Models for the Study of Ageing

During the 1960s, great interest began to develop around the processes of tissue regeneration, chiefly among researchers of Anglo-Saxon origins.

Studies were begun on skin rejuvenation products for topical use, in the form of solutions based on phenol, which is capable of homogenising collagen, reducing melanocytes and increasing the number of elastic fibres.

In 1968, Linus Pauling, Nobel prize winner for chemistry, coined the term orthomolecular medicine to indicate a new type of treatment for diseases, using substances already present in the body such as vitamins.

Tissue oxidation, caused by free radicals, is today thought to be one of the major causes of the ageing and degeneration of body tissues. Research has found that oxidation of cells causes the continual formation of waste products, such as lipofuscin (the ageing pigment) that is thought to accumulate in tissue of ectodermal origin (skin and brain).

Cell cultivation aims on one hand to determine the causes of various diseases, and on the other hand to multiply the cellular heritage for repair purposes.

Cultivation of cartilage cells (chondrocytes) on moulds has made it possible to faithfully reconstruct the shape of the cartilage of the ear, and another recent achievement has been the reproduction of heart valves by cultivating fibroblasts on three-dimensional moulds.

The ultramicroscopic study of epithelial and collectival tissue cells has made it possible to verify the ageing processes and the evolutionary phases of cell regeneration in vitro.

Cell growth factors make possible the multiplication of cells in culture and at present are one of the principle areas of research in the neuro-protection field.

Infusion of Nerve Growth Factor into the brain of experimental animals has shown an increase in the volume of cholinergic neurons, with consequent improvement of the memory and learning capacity, and parenteral administration of the gangloside GM1 has reduced the damage produced on the cerebral cortex and the hyppocampus by retrograde degeneration of cholinergic neurons.

Antioxidant therapy, now in use to prevent skin ageing and to treat necrotic lesions, is an equally important pharmacological strategy to prevent the degeneration of nervous tissue (which has the same embryonic derivation as the skin).