Anti-Aging Treatments Provide General Health Benefits but Do Not Directly Slow Aging Processes
A new study has examined the effectiveness of three treatment approaches that were previously thought to slow the aging process. However, when tested on mice, the researchers found that these treatments had a limited impact on aging.
“There is no internal clock of aging that you can regulate with a simple switch — at least not in the form of the treatments studied here,” concludes Dr. Dan Ehninger of the DZNE, the initiator of the study. The team has developed a new analytical approach to make influences on aging processes measurable.
The study, which was conducted by researchers from DZNE, Helmholtz Munich, and the German Center for Diabetes (DZD) has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Measuring Aging Beyond Lifespan
“We chose three regulators for our interventions that many experts believe to slow down aging,” explains Prof. Dr. Martin Hrabě de Angelis, head of the Institute of Experimental Genetics and director of the German Mouse Clinic at Helmholtz Munich, who also drove the project with his team.
One of them is intermittent fasting, in which the calories consumed are reduced. Number two targets a central node of cell metabolism (mTOR), which is also the target of the supposed “anti-aging drug” rapamycin. Number three, in turn, interferes with the release of growth hormones. Similar treatments are also used by humans, although their efficacy with regard to aging has not been sufficiently proven.
For the assessment in mice, the scientists developed a new answer to the question of how to measure aging. “Many researchers in recent decades have used lifespan as an indirect measure of aging,” explains Dan Ehninger, who is a senior scientist at DZNE. So, for example, how old do mice get — and how can that lifespan be extended?
“It is often assumed that if they just live longer, they will also age more slowly. But the problem is that mice, like many other organisms, do not die from general old age, but from very specific diseases,” says Ehninger. For example, up to 90 percent of mice die from tumors that form in their bodies at an advanced age.
“So, if you were to look at the whole genome for factors that make mice become long-lived, you would like to find many genes that suppress tumor development — and not necessarily genes that play a general role in aging.”
For their study, the scientists, therefore, chose an approach that does not emphasize lifespan but rather focused on a comprehensive investigation of age-related changes in a wide range of bodily functions.
“You can think of it as a complete health status survey,” says Martin Hrabě de Angelis: “The health check results in a compendium of hundreds of factors covering many areas of physiology” — an exact description of the state of the animal at the moment of examination.
That’s exactly the approach the researchers applied to the animals subjected to one of the three treatment approaches that supposedly slow aging. Across different life stages, they were analyzed and compared: How much does each parameter typically change at a given stage of life? And, do parameters change more slowly when the mice are given one of the three treatments? This study design makes it possible to determine precisely whether the natural aging process can be slowed and with it the deterioration of important physiological functions.
Limited Impact of Current Treatments
The results were unambiguous: Although the researchers were able to identify individual cases in which old mice looked younger than they actually were it was clear that “this effect was not due to slowing down aging, but rather due to age-independent factors,” says Dan Ehninger. “The fact that a treatment already has its effect in young mice – prior to the appearance of age-dependent change in health measures – proves that these are compensatory, general health-promoting effects, not a targeting of aging mechanisms.”
The DZNE and Helmholtz Diabetes Center teams have now set their sights on the next goal: They want to investigate other treatment approaches that experts believe can slow aging. The researchers hope that the new research method will provide a more comprehensive picture of possible treatment approaches and their effectiveness.
Reference: “Deep phenotyping and lifetime trajectories reveal limited effects of longevity regulators on the aging process in C57BL/6J mice” by Kan Xie, Helmut Fuchs, Enzo Scifo, Dan Liu, Ahmad Aziz, Juan Antonio Aguilar-Pimentel, Oana Veronica Amarie, Lore Becker, Patricia da Silva-Buttkus, Julia Calzada-Wack, Yi-Li Cho, Yushuang Deng, A. Cole Edwards, Lillian Garrett, Christina Georgopoulou, Raffaele Gerlini, Sabine M. Hölter, Tanja Klein-Rodewald, Michael Kramer, Stefanie Leuchtenberger, Dimitra Lountzi, Phillip Mayer-Kuckuk, Lena L. Nover, Manuela A. Oestereicher, Clemens Overkott, Brandon L. Pearson, Birgit Rathkolb, Jan Rozman, Jenny Russ, Kristina Schaaf, Nadine Spielmann, Adrián Sanz-Moreno, Claudia Stoeger, Irina Treise, Daniele Bano, Dirk H. Busch, Jochen Graw, Martin Klingenspor, Thomas Klopstock, Beverly A. Mock, Paolo Salomoni, Carsten Schmidt-Weber, Marco Weiergräber, Eckhard Wolf, Wolfgang Wurst, Valérie Gailus-Durner, Monique M. B. Breteler, Martin Hrabě de Angelis and Dan Ehninger, 11 November 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34515-y
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3 Comments
It’s funny. When I show virtually any MD a positive supplement study with mice subjects, they always say “but you aren’t a mouse!”.
So when something apparently beneficial is shown NOT to work in mice, does that mean that it has a better chance of working in humans? [lol]
Well, the mice still “appeared” younger even though they aged the same. Some people might think that’s progress.
The concept of aging is accumulative in the negative, we as humankind have the ability to do so positively. The act of doing so blocks negative aging through the natural rejuvenational process!