We always stress the importance of healthy aging. We all age. You can fight it with plastic surgery, but embracing it with exercise and a healthy diet and lifestyle can take you further. Aging well is better than looking young and feeling rough!
Scientists are always working to help people live longer, healthier lives. We have written often about how inflammation damages the body. It can increase insulin resistance. Scientists think blocking a protein that causes inflammation may be key to longevity. The protein is called IL-11. When it was blocked in middle-aged mice, they had boosted metabolism, lower frailty and a 25 percent longer lifespan.
The researchers called the treated mice “supermodel grannies” because they appeared so healthy and young. The photo in our banner shows an untreated vs. treated mouse the same age. In addition to being stronger and healthier, the treated mice also developed fewer cancers. Old lab mice often die from cancer, but the mice without IL-11 were far less likely to develop the disease.
The protein and its molecular partners exist in both mice and humans. Drugs that block IL-11 are already being used in human trials to fight cancer and fibrosis. The drugs are already approved for human testing, making new trials easier. Obtaining permission to start the trials should be a relatively smooth process.
Other potential paths to aiding healthy aging have stalled at the step between animal tests and humans. They have been trying to work on the problem by reducing inflammation. But never made the leap to humans. This could be a breakthrough. “There’s a real opportunity here to translate this into clinical therapies,” says Cathy Slack, who studies the biology of aging at the Univ. of Warwick. “And that’s where the field is kind of stuck at the moment.”
Older research first found that chronic inflammation is linked to diseases associated with aging. When looking at proteins from an older rat, researchers saw that IL-11 was much higher than in younger rats. That led to testing mice and finding the same pattern. That led to a study wherein they deleted the gene that makes the IL-11 protein in mice and saw that they were healthier and lived 25 percent longer. That leads to the researchers now wanting to work with humans. Finding the right drug to target IL-11 in humans may take some time.
“Aging is a tough field,” said Stuart Cook, a medical researcher who worked on the research and studies IL-11 at Duke-National Univ. of Singapore Medical School. “But there are a lot of therapeutic angles, and a lot more biology left to understand.”
Prof. Cook’s colleague Anissa Widjaja said, “Although our work was done in mice, we hope that these findings will be highly relevant to human health, given that we have seen similar effects in studies of human cells and tissues.”
