French researchers believe they have found the secrets of disease-free longevity in the mechanisms of food restriction. The race to develop an “anti-aging pill” is on.
The American company Google is not the only one to have given itself the mission of euthanizing death. But this time, it is French researchers who are announcing that they are working on a track to fight against aging. It is in fact the team (1) of geneticist Hugo Aguilaniu who discovered a hormone producing the effect of a drastic diet, thus increasing longevity. Unpublished results published in the journal Nature communications.
Malnutrition increases lifespan
To arrive at this discovery, these scientists started from the following postulate: a drastic diet, just on the edge of malnutrition, increases the length of life, by reducing the diseases of old age.
To conduct their experiment, they used a roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans) known in science to provide a wealth of information on the mechanisms of aging.
These researchers then subjected the invertebrate to a severe diet. Thus, the geneticist and his team managed to keep it alive and active for six months, while this species usually dies after about 2 weeks.
By reproducing the operation, the team noticed that this drastic diet also worked on other species, in particular in mice (25% more life expectancy), in cats and in primates. Hugo Aguilaniu is therefore hopeful that it will be the same in humans …
An anti-aging hormone
But how to explain this? Researchers have identified in this worm a hormone produced in response to malnutrition, dafachronic acid, which is believed to be linked to longer lifespan. Unfortunately, this molecule is also linked to decreased fertility, irritability and decreased libido.
These are all undesirable effects that must be dissociated from the anti-aging activity of the hormone, in order to obtain a satisfactory therapeutic treatment in humans. According to these researchers, the hormone identified in the worm would indeed have a close cousin in humans.
“If we manage to understand all these mechanisms, we will be able to act to have the positive effects without the negative effects” rejoices Hugo Aguilaniu, who assures us that “things will come out within ten years”. Among the first leads on the table, that of an association between this hormone and Rapamycin, an antibiotic that prolonged the life of elderly mice, according to another study in the scientific journal Nature in 2009.
(1) Laboratory of molecular biology of the cell (CNRS-ENS de Lyon-UCBL)
.
