Thursday, December 21, 2006
Genetics insights may extend lifespan
The study of a rare genetic disease that speeds up the aging process may lead scientists to ways to extend human lifespans. Erasmus Medical Center geneticists Jan Hoeijmaker and his colleagues examined DNA from a boy who suffered from XPF-progeroid syndrome, a condition that caused him to die of "old age" at just 15. From Scientific American:
The teen's illness... when replicated in mice, allowed an international team of researchers to answer a fundamental question in the science of aging: Do we get old due to the accumulation of damage over our lifetimes or due to the genetic blueprint we inherit?Link
"What we say is [that] both are valid and that, in particular, damage to DNA contributes to aging," says Jan Hoeijmakers, a geneticist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and lead author of the study, which comprised teams from four different institutions in Europe and the U.S. "Damage accumulates ... but it is modulated by your genetic makeup. If you have better repair and/or slower metabolism, you age slower..."
The researchers compared the activity of thousands of genes in the liver of a 15-day-old mutant mouse to those in a normal mouse who lived two and a half years. The result? "The rapidly aging mice switched their activity from growth to maintenance and repair, up-regulating cellular defenses and down-regulating respiration and metabolism," Hoeijmakers says. "This also occurs upon natural aging, and if you [could] switch to this 'survival' mode early in life, you would live longer."
posted by David Pescovitz at 09:45:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
