Call To Tackle The Causes Of Ageing Rather Than Treating The Effects

Main Category: Seniors / Aging
Article Date: 27 May 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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Tackling the very causes of ageing, rather than treating the symptoms in a piecemeal way offers the best prospects for dealing with the diseases and effects of ageing according to a public lecture being given at the Royal Society tonight.

New research that offers up hope to improve health during ageing in humans, and to tackle a broad range of ageing-related diseases, will be presented tonight by Director of the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing Professor Linda Partridge. She believes these scientific advances are inspiring a new wave in ageing research.

Professor Partridge says: "Research on the diseases associated with ageing is generally done by separate communities of research workers who read different journals, attend different conferences and generally do not communicate with each other. But by tacking the causes of ageing itself we could treat, or at least delay, a broad spectrum of conditions simultaneously"

Two discoveries are proving especially exciting in the field. Mutations in single genes have been found to extend the lifespan of animals in the lab - such as worms, fruit flies and mice - and appear to play the same role in humans. And these mutations can also produce a broad-spectrum improvement in health during ageing.

So far, signalling pathways that sense nutrients have proved to have the most robust effect on healthy lifespan. For instance, in mammals insulin regulates blood sugar levels and metabolism in response to food intake, while the related insulin-like growth factor 1(Igf1) regulates growth. Mutations in genes that encode the protein components of the insulin and Igf1 signalling pathways have proved to extend lifespan in a nematode worm, the fruit fly and mice, and genetic variants for these genes in humans have proved to associate with lifespan.

Dietary restriction, which is a simple environmental intervention, can also extend life in a range of animals. Drugs which inhibit the nutrient pathways in humans could replicate the effects of dietary restriction and act not only to increase healthy lifespan but to target a broad range of ageing related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes and Alzheimer's.

This research means a new approach to the treatment of age-related conditions.

Partridge adds: "The major burden of ill health is in the older section of the population. The new discoveries about ageing have raised the prospect of increasing the number of years that people enjoy in good health, with broad-spectrum preventative medicines for the diseases of ageing"

Professor Partridge will be speaking as the latest winner of The Croonian Prize. The Croonian Lecture is the Royal Society's premier lecture in the biological sciences.

Source
The Royal Society

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