Drugs that combat ageing may be available within five years, following landmark work led by an Australian researcher.
According to Medical News Today, the work, published in the March 8 issue of Science, finally proves that a single anti-ageing enzyme in the body can be targeted, with the potential to prevent age-related diseases and extend lifespans.
The paper shows all of the 117 drugs tested work on the single enzyme through a common mechanism. This means that a whole new class of anti-ageing drugs is now viable, which could ultimately prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes.
“Ultimately, these drugs would treat one disease, but unlike drugs of today, they would prevent 20 others,” says the lead author of the paper, Professor David Sinclair, from UNSW Medicine, who is based at Harvard University. “In effect, they would slow ageing.”
The target enzyme, SIRT1, is switched on naturally by calorie restriction and exercise, but it can also be enhanced through activators. The most common naturally-occurring activator is resveratrol, which is found in small quantities in red wine, but synthetic activators with much stronger activity are already being developed.
Although research surrounding resveratrol has been going for a decade, until now, the basic science had been contested. Despite this, there have already been promising results in some trials with implications for cancer, cardiovascular disease and cardiac failure, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, fatty liver disease, cataracts, osteoporosis, muscle wasting, sleep disorders and inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis, arthritis and colitis (inflammatory bowel disease).
“In the history of pharmaceuticals, there has never been a drug that tweaks an enzyme to make it run faster,” says Professor Sinclair, a geneticist with the Department of Pharmacology at UNSW.
The technology was sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2008. Four thousand synthetic activators, which are 100 times as potent as a single glass of red wine, have been developed - the best three are in human trials.
“Our drugs can mimic the benefits of diet and exercise, but there is no impact on weight,” says Professor Sinclair, who suggests the first therapeutic to be marketed will be for diabetes.
There have been limited trials in people with type 2 diabetes and the skin inflammatory disease, psoriasis. There were benefits to the metabolism in the first group and a reduction in skin redness in the second.
The drugs can be administered orally, or topically. So far, there have been no drugs developed targeting ageing skin, but one major skin care range has developed a crème with resveratrol in it.
While any drug would be strictly prescribed for certain conditions, Professor Sinclair suggests that one day, they could be taken orally as a preventative. This would be in much the same way as statin drugs are commonly prescribed to prevent, instead of simply treating, cardiovascular disease.
In animal models, overweight mice given synthetic resveratrol were able to run twice as far as slim mice and they lived 15 per cent longer.
“Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. Things there are also looking promising,” says Professor Sinclair, who also heads the Lowy Cancer Research Centre’s Laboratory for Ageing Research at UNSW.
“We’re finding that ageing isn’t the irreversible affliction that we thought it was,” he says. “Some of us could live to 150, but we won’t get there without more research.”
In another study, it has been discovered that being overweight, especially from a young age, appears to lead to a bigger heart later in life, a condition that has been linked to serious heart problems and even death, Science Daily has reported.
This forms part of the research being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s 62nd annual scientific session.
Results of this longitudinal study found that people who carry excess weight over their lifetime are much more likely to have increases in left ventricular mass and relative wall thickness — both strong and independent predictors of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. In this instance, timing is indeed everything; the earlier someone becomes overweight, the greater the increase in the heart’s mass later in life.
“Being overweight in your 20s can have detrimental effects on the heart 40 years in the future, especially if you keep the weight on over the years,” said Arjun K. Ghosh, clinical research fellow at the International Centre for Circulatory Health of Britain’s National Heart and Lung Institute and at the U.K. Medical Research Council’s Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing and the study’s lead investigator, on behalf of the full study team.
“It’s probably the wrong attitude to think ‘I know I’m overweight now, but I’ll lose the weight later’ because the longer you spend overweight, the greater the weight of your heart muscle. And we know from other studies that even if we take away or account for high blood pressure, diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease, somebody with a bigger heart muscle is more likely to have a heart attack, die or have other problems, such as stroke.”
Researchers tracked the body mass index (BMI) of 1,653 men and women at different points in their lives to examine the effects of being overweight on the structure of the heart. BMI is a simple measure of the body’s fat using a calculation of weight to height. People who were considered overweight, with a BMI of 25 to 29.9, or obese, with a BMI of 30 or above, had the heaviest hearts. Dr. Ghosh said few, if any, studies have been able to look at this question over such a long duration. He and his team drew from 44 years of data. Strikingly, the heart was 7 per cent heavier for those who were overweight beginning in their 20s compared to those who only became overweight in their 60s.
“Our findings add to the wealth of evidence that obesity and being overweight from a young age is not good and provide yet another reason we need to focus on preventing obesity and promoting a healthy lifestyle,” he said. “Being overweight is a significant risk factor for heart disease, and worldwide, people seem to be becoming overweight at younger and younger ages.”
Dr. Ghosh said previous research demonstrates that it is difficult to go back to and maintain a normal weight once someone has become overweight.
As such, prevention of becoming overweight in the first place should be the aim. This is especially relevant amid the growing obesity epidemic, even among children. One in three school-aged children in North America are now overweight and this upward trend shows no signs of slowing, which means more children are entering adulthood carrying excess weight.
Individuals included in this study are participants in the Medical Research Council, National Survey of Health and Development (or the 1946 British birth cohort), which is the longest running birth cohort study in the United Kingdom. Between ages 60 and 64, participants underwent echocardiography, an ultrasound of the heart, to allow researchers to measure the size of the heart muscle and their BMI was calculated. BMI and other cardiovascular risk factors had previously been measured at 20, 26, 36, 43 and 53 years of age. Higher BMI from 20 years onward was associated with increased heart muscle mass, with those with higher BMIs at each time point having heavier hearts at age 60-64 years of age.
These associations remain after researchers adjusted for related risk factors, e.g., high blood pressure, diabetes and sex.
Two previous analyses of cardiac health indicators in the same study cohort revealed that people with diabetes are at greater risk of heart problems the longer they had diabetes and that a sharp spike in blood pressure during midlife, not just crossing a certain threshold, such as becoming hypertensive, can increase a person’s risk of heart disease later in life.
TRIBUNE
According to Medical News Today, the work, published in the March 8 issue of Science, finally proves that a single anti-ageing enzyme in the body can be targeted, with the potential to prevent age-related diseases and extend lifespans.
The paper shows all of the 117 drugs tested work on the single enzyme through a common mechanism. This means that a whole new class of anti-ageing drugs is now viable, which could ultimately prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes.
“Ultimately, these drugs would treat one disease, but unlike drugs of today, they would prevent 20 others,” says the lead author of the paper, Professor David Sinclair, from UNSW Medicine, who is based at Harvard University. “In effect, they would slow ageing.”
The target enzyme, SIRT1, is switched on naturally by calorie restriction and exercise, but it can also be enhanced through activators. The most common naturally-occurring activator is resveratrol, which is found in small quantities in red wine, but synthetic activators with much stronger activity are already being developed.
Although research surrounding resveratrol has been going for a decade, until now, the basic science had been contested. Despite this, there have already been promising results in some trials with implications for cancer, cardiovascular disease and cardiac failure, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, fatty liver disease, cataracts, osteoporosis, muscle wasting, sleep disorders and inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis, arthritis and colitis (inflammatory bowel disease).
“In the history of pharmaceuticals, there has never been a drug that tweaks an enzyme to make it run faster,” says Professor Sinclair, a geneticist with the Department of Pharmacology at UNSW.
The technology was sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2008. Four thousand synthetic activators, which are 100 times as potent as a single glass of red wine, have been developed - the best three are in human trials.
“Our drugs can mimic the benefits of diet and exercise, but there is no impact on weight,” says Professor Sinclair, who suggests the first therapeutic to be marketed will be for diabetes.
There have been limited trials in people with type 2 diabetes and the skin inflammatory disease, psoriasis. There were benefits to the metabolism in the first group and a reduction in skin redness in the second.
The drugs can be administered orally, or topically. So far, there have been no drugs developed targeting ageing skin, but one major skin care range has developed a crème with resveratrol in it.
While any drug would be strictly prescribed for certain conditions, Professor Sinclair suggests that one day, they could be taken orally as a preventative. This would be in much the same way as statin drugs are commonly prescribed to prevent, instead of simply treating, cardiovascular disease.
In animal models, overweight mice given synthetic resveratrol were able to run twice as far as slim mice and they lived 15 per cent longer.
“Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. Things there are also looking promising,” says Professor Sinclair, who also heads the Lowy Cancer Research Centre’s Laboratory for Ageing Research at UNSW.
“We’re finding that ageing isn’t the irreversible affliction that we thought it was,” he says. “Some of us could live to 150, but we won’t get there without more research.”
In another study, it has been discovered that being overweight, especially from a young age, appears to lead to a bigger heart later in life, a condition that has been linked to serious heart problems and even death, Science Daily has reported.
This forms part of the research being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s 62nd annual scientific session.
Results of this longitudinal study found that people who carry excess weight over their lifetime are much more likely to have increases in left ventricular mass and relative wall thickness — both strong and independent predictors of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. In this instance, timing is indeed everything; the earlier someone becomes overweight, the greater the increase in the heart’s mass later in life.
“Being overweight in your 20s can have detrimental effects on the heart 40 years in the future, especially if you keep the weight on over the years,” said Arjun K. Ghosh, clinical research fellow at the International Centre for Circulatory Health of Britain’s National Heart and Lung Institute and at the U.K. Medical Research Council’s Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing and the study’s lead investigator, on behalf of the full study team.
“It’s probably the wrong attitude to think ‘I know I’m overweight now, but I’ll lose the weight later’ because the longer you spend overweight, the greater the weight of your heart muscle. And we know from other studies that even if we take away or account for high blood pressure, diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease, somebody with a bigger heart muscle is more likely to have a heart attack, die or have other problems, such as stroke.”
Researchers tracked the body mass index (BMI) of 1,653 men and women at different points in their lives to examine the effects of being overweight on the structure of the heart. BMI is a simple measure of the body’s fat using a calculation of weight to height. People who were considered overweight, with a BMI of 25 to 29.9, or obese, with a BMI of 30 or above, had the heaviest hearts. Dr. Ghosh said few, if any, studies have been able to look at this question over such a long duration. He and his team drew from 44 years of data. Strikingly, the heart was 7 per cent heavier for those who were overweight beginning in their 20s compared to those who only became overweight in their 60s.
“Our findings add to the wealth of evidence that obesity and being overweight from a young age is not good and provide yet another reason we need to focus on preventing obesity and promoting a healthy lifestyle,” he said. “Being overweight is a significant risk factor for heart disease, and worldwide, people seem to be becoming overweight at younger and younger ages.”
Dr. Ghosh said previous research demonstrates that it is difficult to go back to and maintain a normal weight once someone has become overweight.
As such, prevention of becoming overweight in the first place should be the aim. This is especially relevant amid the growing obesity epidemic, even among children. One in three school-aged children in North America are now overweight and this upward trend shows no signs of slowing, which means more children are entering adulthood carrying excess weight.
Individuals included in this study are participants in the Medical Research Council, National Survey of Health and Development (or the 1946 British birth cohort), which is the longest running birth cohort study in the United Kingdom. Between ages 60 and 64, participants underwent echocardiography, an ultrasound of the heart, to allow researchers to measure the size of the heart muscle and their BMI was calculated. BMI and other cardiovascular risk factors had previously been measured at 20, 26, 36, 43 and 53 years of age. Higher BMI from 20 years onward was associated with increased heart muscle mass, with those with higher BMIs at each time point having heavier hearts at age 60-64 years of age.
These associations remain after researchers adjusted for related risk factors, e.g., high blood pressure, diabetes and sex.
Two previous analyses of cardiac health indicators in the same study cohort revealed that people with diabetes are at greater risk of heart problems the longer they had diabetes and that a sharp spike in blood pressure during midlife, not just crossing a certain threshold, such as becoming hypertensive, can increase a person’s risk of heart disease later in life.
TRIBUNE
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