Callum Jones
A man who spent a record 100 days underwater has opened up about the experience and how it's impacted his body.
While most of us sit around trying to challenge ourselves to making it to the gym three times a week - and still failing - in 2023, Dr Joseph Dituri decided to challenge himself to spending a staggering 100 days in a habitat located 30 feet under a Florida lagoon.
Dr Dituri didn't just do the challenge for the hell of it though, but as part of an experiment to see how living underwater for such an extended period of time could affect his body and ultimately to research a type of medicine that can help deliver oxygen to the human body under high pressures by helping it to grow new blood vessels.
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The challenge saw the scientist and former naval officer scuba dive into a 9m by 9m room and monitor his body's reaction to the extreme pressure of living underwater for so long - supervised by medical, psychological and psychosocial experts.
A press release from last year added: "Part of the work will see a psychologist and a psychiatrist monitor the effects he experiences while in an environment similar to extended space travel.
"It's an isolating confined extreme environment. And as humans, we really need to figure out how we're going to be living in that (environment) if we're going to expand our planet, if we're going to go interplanetary, if we're going to find all the cures that we need to find."
Oh and as if that wasn't enough to be getting on with already, he also decided to teach school kids via video. And he also discovered a 'brand new species' during the feat.
When he emerged from his underwater mission last June, Dr Dituri claimed that blood tests showed a 50 percent reduction in every inflammatory marker in his body.
He claimed a lot of areas of his health improved following the 100-day mission, including longer telomeres - structures on chromosomes that are often linked to extending life.
Speaking to reporters at WKMG News in Orlando, Dr Dituri said: "I'm 56 now. My extrinsic [biological] age was 44. When I got out of the water, my extrinsic age was 34.
"So, my telomeres lengthened. I actually got younger when I was under the water."
Dr Dituri claims that his telomeres are not as long as they were when he first came out in June, but they are longer than they were before he embarked on his research.
He also believes his phenomenal 'age reversal' was caused by living in a high-pressure or 'hyperbaric' environment.