Research has shown that reduced calorie intake can increase health and longevity. Professor Stephen Spindler’s group from the University of California have discovered that reducing calorie intake later in life can still induce many of the health and longevity benefits of life-long calorie reduction. This also includes anti-cancer effects. They are using this knowledge to establish a novel screening technique to find drugs which mimic this longevity effect. “Right now, there are no authentic “anti-ageing drugs” capable of extending the lifespan of healthy people. The technique we have developed allows us to screen a relatively large number of drugs in months rather than years. The hope is that these drugs will be able to extend the lifespan of healthy animals, and possibly, after further testing, healthy humans”, says Professor Spindler who presented his results at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Main Meeting in Glasgow.
Previous research has show that mice can live up to 40% longer if they simply consume fewer calories, but a highly nutritious diet. Because people are not very good at dieting, Dr. Spindler and his colleagues would like to identify drugs which can produce the same beneficial health and longevity effects without the low calorie diet.
Physiological changes associated with ageing include cell damage and the emergence of cancer cells. The most important effects of low calorie diets and longevity therapeutics given late in life may not be to prevent this damage, but instead to stimulate the body to eliminate damaged cells that may become cancerous, and to stimulate repair in damaged cells like neurons and heart cells. Low calorie diets drive the body to replace and repair damaged cells.
Source: Medical News Today
