Scientists Discover Possible Anti-Aging Gene 323
werelnon writes "The BBC is running an article about researchers who seem to have discovered a gene which controls aging. By stimulating this gene, which when malfunctioning causes premature aging, scientists have managed to prolong the average life span of lab mice from 2 to 3 years. Because a very similar gene is present in humans it is quite possible it will do the same thing for people." From the article: "But there may be downsides with Klotho. The long-lived mice in the new experiments tend to be less fertile. And the gene may also predispose people to diabetes. The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks."
Re:klotho? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:klotho? (Score:2, Informative)
Related subjects (Score:5, Informative)
The Hayflick Barrier [bioinfo.org.cn], that suggests cells will replicate only a certain number of times.
Hela cells [wikipedia.org] having to do with cancerous "immortal cells" and the length of telomeres [wikipedia.org] and aging.
lysosomes [wikipedia.org] which as the "recycling bins" of cells may overtime become "clogged" with material the cells are unable to recycle and cause cell death.
No matter that there may be a genetic tweak for aging there are other things at play that may impact on the genetic tweak.
Age Limits (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few limitations to our lifespan. The Hayflick limit [senescence.info] may be a driving factor. Body cells, with very few exceptions, have a limit on the number of divisions they can make. This may be related to the way that every time a cell divides, one of the daughter cells has a slightly shorter copy. The ends of the chromosome are telomeres, the aglets [senescence.info] on our gene shoelaces.
Of course, many of our tissues divide more than others, and we're vulnerable to a weak point of failure, whether it be skin tissue (definitely a point of infection), blood supply, blood vessels or what have you.
There have been two major schools of thought about aging, and many points in-between. On one side, some think that aging is caused by an incredible number of small failures from separate causes, and to try to beat aging is doomed to fail on this alone. On the other side of the issue, there are those who believe one or perhaps two major items are at fault for aging, and that we can close to an Elixir of Youth. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
I still highly recommend Michael D. West's book The Immortal Cell [amazon.com] for an inside account of one search for a cure for aging. (He's also one of the co-authors of the hefty tome Principles of Cloning [amazon.com]). Fascinating stuff, and definitely not the stuff of 'fringe' science.
Re:You can live longer, but will you feel/look you (Score:1, Informative)
So this would mean being healthier for longer. Everybody knows of the odd person who is 80, but looks like a 60-year old and acts like a 40 year-old (running marathons etc.). Possible treatments for ageing are aimed at prevented age-related decline and making sure most people can be like that 80 year-old.
Big deal you say. You'd rather die. Fine - but then you might miss out on the advances that come along 10 or 20 years down the track, which might reverse the decline which has already occurred.
More life is always better (unless you believe in an afterlife I guess).
Re:Quality of life is decreasing (Score:5, Informative)
I also do not see how natural organic sugar is going to affect us in any way. Sugar is sugar, our bodies process the sugar from apples the same as the sugar from coke and pepsi, however apples contain many benneficial antioxidants and far less sugar than soda pop. It's just like natural sea salt, it's still just salt.
I have a degree in nutrition, and from what you are saying you seem to know know anything at all about how the human body works. High fructose corn syrup is not digested in the same way as cane sugar. The glycemic index is different, the body simply was never designed for liquid sugar. If you create liquid salt, the body is not designed for liquid salt. The body is designed to slowly digest sugars in the form of packaged foods like fruit, veggies, and from natural sources. High fructose cornsyrup was made in a lab somewhere.
Eating less fast food is healthy, but its not that simple. Not all fast food is unhealthy, and not all slowly cooked food is healthy. Most products you have in your house have high fructose cornsyrup and cancer causing agents inside them, and depending on how you cook the food decides your cancer risk.
What people need to do is just go back to the cave man diet, if its packaged don't eat it. If you can see what it is and you know what each ingredient on the back of the package is, then go ahead and eat it. Never eat processed foods and you wont have to worry so much about diabetes or heart disease. The problem is its almost impossible to find foods which arent processed in a normal supermarket.
I suggest you take a class on nutrition, and learn more about high fructose corn syrup and the dangers of certain kinds of salts, mercury, and other chemicals which are neurotoxic. Everything you eat influences your body in some way. Your health is based on what you eat, not how much, not where, not how long it takes to cook. Excercise won't cure diabetes or heart disease, it will delay it. Bill Clinton has heart disease, he jogged every day.
Re:klotho? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirae [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotho [wikipedia.org]
Text from original articles in Science (Score:1, Informative)
A defect in Klotho gene expression in mice accelerates the degeneration of multiple age-sensitive traits. Here we show that overexpression of Klotho in mice extends life span. Klotho protein functions as a circulating hormone that binds to a cell-surface receptor and represses intracellular signals of insulin and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF1), an evolutionarily conserved mechanism for extending life span. Alleviation of aging-like phenotypes in Klotho-deficient mice was observed by perturbing insulin/IGF1 signaling, suggesting that Klotho-mediated inhibition of insulin/IGF1 signaling contributes to its anti-aging properties. Klotho protein may function as an anti-aging hormone in mammals.
News of the Week: Boosting Gene Extends Mouse Life Span [sciencemag.org]
A protein named after the Greek goddess who spins life's thread has joined the short list of ways to extend a mouse's natural life span. Whereas lab mice can live about 2 years, mice engineered to overproduce this protein, called Klotho, have celebrated third birthdays, Makoto Kuro-o of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and his colleagues report online in this week's Science Express (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1112766). The mutant rodents represent a rare case of a single gene substantially influencing life span in mammals.
"I'm not a dreamer; I don't think we're going to find a master control gene for aging," says Harry Dietz, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who studies Klotho's counterpart in humans. But, he says, "this is the next best thing. We have found something that perhaps has the ability to make old age richer."
But Kuro-o, who discovered the gene that encodes Klotho, worries that "too much Klotho might not be very good." The mice he created with extra Klotho look like animals at risk of diabetes. There's also disagreement over how Klotho works.
Mice lacking Klotho die young, after developing arteriosclerosis and other age-related conditions much earlier than normal (Science, 7 November 1997, p. 1013). Still, many doubted that extra Klotho would lengthen life span. With a short-lived mutant, "you always have to worry that it's just sick," says Cynthia Kenyon, who studies aging at the University of California, San Francisco.
So, Kuro-o, his postdoctoral fellows Hiroshi Kurosu and Masaya Yamamoto, and colleagues at universities in the U.S. and Japan created mice overexpressing the gene for Klotho. While Klotho is produced only in the kidney and brain, a fragment of it slips into the blood and may act like a hormone. Males making extra Klotho lived up to 30% longer than normal males, and the mutant females survived 20% longer than normal counterparts. As with lab animals coaxed to have lengthy life spans, the altered rodents had fertility problems. They produced about half the expected number of offspring.
Males appeared more affected by Klotho than females did. Their blood, unlike that of females, contained more insulin than normal mice. This suggested that the male mutants were somewhat resistant to insulin--a symptom, in extreme forms, of diabetes. The Klotho-boosted males and females had normal glucose levels, a surprise because untreated diabetes causes high glucose. These features don't appear in other long-lived mice, which are usually insulin-sensitive and have low glucose.
Klotho's effects on insulin could connect
Re:Geriatrics (Score:3, Informative)
As the name implies people are eating themselves into it.
A large number of fertility issues have also been linked to pollutants in our environment.
Re:life expectancy really isn't increasing... (Score:4, Informative)
Our health is massively improved due largely to hygiene and nutrition because despite the damage that diet can do, the benefits of the improved nutrition of the last 50 - 100 years has lead to larger fitter bodies with almost no incidences of malnutrition in the developed world. The proof is in the life expectancy of the under developed world where both these factors do not exist.
I cannot get the stats to hand but if you take out mortality in the first five years (which would eliminate the skew you mention from neo/post natal care) then the expected age of a developed world human is vastly greater than it was.
Further evidence of this is the graph of resting pulse rate vs life expectancy of mammals. It is a remarkable fact that "apart from humans" all mammals exhibit a direct correlation between heart rate and life expetancy to the extent that mammals all seem to have the same number of heartbeats in their life (statistically speaking) apart from humans who are way off the graph with many many more heart beats than normal mammals. Such a contrary position is hard to explain from simple physiological differences.
Re:Quality of life is decreasing (Score:1, Informative)
I have a degree in nutrition, and from what you are saying you seem to know know anything at all about how the human body works. High fructose corn syrup is not digested in the same way as cane sugar. The glycemic index is different, the body simply was never designed for liquid sugar. If you create liquid salt, the body is not designed for liquid salt. The body is designed to slowly digest sugars in the form of packaged foods like fruit, veggies, and from natural sources. High fructose cornsyrup was made in a lab somewhere.
Apparently your nutrition degree didn't include any physics or chemistry. Both can sugar and salt can exist as liquids without anything more than a temperature increase. Likewise corn syrup can be frozen. Welcome to the wonder that is the many states of matter.
Beyond that, corn syrup, even the high-fructose variety, is at least 45% glucose. For the sake of brevity I going to assume that you nutrition degree taught you something about glucose and how it's, you know, the basis for cellular respiration and the direct product of photosynthesis.
You could argue that the fructose component of HFCS is more harmful than glucose, but those slow-digesting fruits and vegitables you love so much are loaded with the stuff, so I'd recommend that you choose another line of reasoning. Unless of course you meant to exclude tree fruits, berries, melons, onions and sweet potatoes from the list of "natural sources" that are supposed to be good for me.
In summary, the fact the it grew outside doesn't make it healthy, useful or good. Asbestos is a natural product. I still wouldn't eat it. The fact that it was chemically processed doesn't make it unhealthy, dangerous or bad. And before you post ridiculous rants in your supposed area of education you might want to check the basic science out first. Or have a cookie -- I hear sugar is good for the brain.