Everyone desires to live a long life, but nobody wants to experience weakness in their older age. Researchers at the University of Connecticut have discovered a treatment that could extend both lifespan and vitality.
While human lifespans have increased significantly over the last hundred years, the final decade of life often brings about a severe decline in health. This period can be marked by the onset of chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, followed by increased frailty. Although there are many ways to extend life, these don’t always ensure continued good health. Most people prefer not to face their final years in a state of decline, even if their overall lifespan is extended.
Gerontologist Ming Xu of the UConn School of Medicine presents an amazing discovery in the August edition of Cell Metabolism, mice which received monthly therapy lived 9% longer, or roughly 79 more days. Even more remarkable, when compared to same age untreated counterparts, these treated mice not only lived longer but also continued to walk faster and have stronger grips. There is a clear correlation between increased frailty and decreased walking speed and grip strength in people. Surprisingly, the treated mice maintained their strength and mobility until the very end of the treatment period.(1✔ ✔Trusted Source
Intermittent clearance of p21-highly-expressing cells extends lifespan and confers sustained benefits to health and physical function
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Increased Lifespan and Strength
The research is particularly significant because of the painstaking measurement and record keeping this project required. Most experiments on mice, health, and longevity pick a certain end point in time—18 or 24 months—and measure the effect of the treatment at that specific endpoint. But Xu, along with postdocs Binsheng Wang and Lichao Wang and their colleagues, measured the health, grip strength, and walking speed, along with a bevy of additional metrics, on the mice monthly from the time the mice were 20 months old (equivalent to 60 year old humans) until death. Some mice lived as long as 43 months. By doing this, they could assess the physical function and overall health changes of each mouse throughout the entire treatment period. Since each mouse died at a different age, this approach also allows Xu’s team to evaluate health status in the time leading up to death, which often represents the frailest and sickest stage of life.
Excitingly, they found that even though the treated mice were older at the time of death, their physical function and overall frailty were better than those of the controls during their last stage of life.
“We are all very excited about this finding, because it demonstrates that we not only extend the lifespan, but indeed extend the life with good health in mice, which is a key goal for the aging field,” says Xu, assistant professor of the UConn Center on Aging and the Department of Genetics & Genome Sciences at UConn School of Medicine.
Treatment of Inflammatory Cells
The researchers used two groups of mice. One group received monthly treatments to remove highly inflammatory cells from their tissues; the control group did not. ‘Highly inflammatory cells’ were defined as those actively expressing a specific gene called p21.
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The team, including researchers from UConn Health, The University of Texas, Cedars-Sinai, The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, and the UNMC College of Dentistry, found the monthly treatments extended both the maximum lifespan of mice—the oldest treated mice lived to be 43 months, equivalent to about 130 years old as a human—as well as the average lifespan, so that the average treated mouse lived longer, and healthier, than the average untreated mouse.
The researchers are now working on a way to translate their results to humans. If the treatment works as well for humans, it would be equivalent to 8 to 10 additional years of healthy old age.
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Reference:
- Continuous intermittent clearance of p21-highly-expressing cells extends lifespan and confers sustained benefits to health and physical function. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2024.07.006 )
Source-Eurekalert
