We constantly hear how recycling is important. It turns out that matters both for the environment and for our own body. Researchers have discovered that organisms that can efficiently dispose of bad cells have an extended lifespan and better quality of life.
The discovery builds on two decades of research on autophagy, the process by which the body destroys and recycles cells that are old or damaged. As reported in Nature, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center found that genetically engineered mice with high levels of autophagy lived longer, healthier lives compared to their “regular” counterparts.
“Specifically, they have about a 10 percent extension in lifespan and are less likely to develop age-related spontaneous cancers and age-related pathological changes in the heart and the kidney,” Dr Beth Levine, director of the Center for Autophagy Research at UT Southwestern, said in a statement.
Analysis of the animals’ organs showed that the mutant mice had fewer signs of aging, including less scarring of their hearts and livers and less age-related cancers.
Twenty years ago, Dr Levine discovered the genes that regulate autophagy. Her team and associated groups have shown that the genetic machinery for autophagy is involved in extending roundworms' lifespan and that mice with high levels of autophagy are partially protected from Alzheimer’s disease. The research question for this study was whether increasing autophagy is both safe and beneficial for animals, especially mammals.
“These studies have important implications for human health and for the development of drugs to improve it,” said Dr Levine, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “They show that strategies to increase the cellular housekeeping pathway of autophagy may retard aging and aging-related diseases. The results suggest that it should be safe to increase autophagy on a chronic basis to treat diseases such as neurodegeneration. Furthermore, they reveal a specific target for developing drugs that increase autophagy.”
The creation of drugs is the ultimate goal of this research. The team have some preliminary compounds that could be suitable for such a goal. While human testing is still far in the future, they hope to have people with age-related conditions to be among the first to trial this approach.
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