Easter Island Chemical Extends Life Expectancy

[rayne]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1198366/Fountain-youth-drug-extend-life-decade.html

[cornilouse]

A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests.

When US scientists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifespan by up to 38%.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, raise the prospect of being able to slow down the ageing process in older people.

However, a UK expert warned against using the drug to try to extend lifespan, as it can suppress immunity.


We believe this is the first convincing evidence that the ageing process can be slowed and lifespan can be extended by a drug therapy starting at an advanced age.
Professor Randy Strong
University of Texas

Rapamycin was first discovered on Easter Island in the 1970s.

It is already used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients, and in stents implanted into patients to keep their coronary arteries open. It is also being tested as a possible treatment for cancer.

Researchers at three centres in Texas, Michigan and Maine gave the drug to mice at an age equivalent to 60 in humans.

The mice were bred to mimic the genetic diversity and susceptibility to disease of humans as closely as possible.

Rapamycin extended the animals' expected lifespan by between 28% and 38%.

The researchers estimated that in human terms this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life, if both cancer and heart disease were prevented and cured.

Researcher Dr Arlan Richardson, of the Barshop Institute, said: "I've been in ageing research for 35 years and there have been many so-called 'anti-ageing' interventions over those years that were never successful.

"I never thought we would find an anti-ageing pill for people in my lifetime; however, rapamycin shows a great deal of promise to do just that."

Professor Randy Strong, of the University of Texas Health Science Center, said: "We believe this is the first convincing evidence that the ageing process can be slowed and lifespan can be extended by a drug therapy starting at an advanced age."

Calorie restriction

Rapamycin appears to have a similar effect to restricting food intake, which has also been shown to boost longevity.


In no way should anyone consider using this particular drug to try to extend their own lifespan, as rapamycin suppresses immunity
Dr Lynne Cox
University of Oxford

It targets a protein in cells called mTOR, which controls many processes involved in metabolism and response to stress.

The researchers had to find a way to re-formulate the drug so that it was stable enough to make it to the mice's intestines before beginning to break down.

The original aim was to begin feeding the mice at four months of age, but the delay caused by developing the new formulation meant that feeding did not start until the animals were 20 months old.

The researchers thought the animals would be too old for the drug to have any effect - and were surprised when it did.

Professor Strong said: "This study has clearly identified a potential therapeutic target for the development of drugs aimed at preventing age-related diseases and extending healthy lifespan.

"If rapamycin, or drugs like rapamycin, works as envisioned, the potential reduction in health cost will be enormous."

'Don't try it now'

Dr Lynne Cox, an expert in ageing at the University of Oxford, described the study as "exciting".

She said: "It is especially interesting that the drug was effective even when given to older mice, as it would be much better to treat ageing in older people rather than using drugs long-term through life."

However, she added: "In no way should anyone consider using this particular drug to try to extend their own lifespan, as rapamycin suppresses immunity.

"While the lab mice were protected from infection, that's simply impossible in the human population.

"What the study does is to highlight an important molecular pathway that new, more specific drugs might be designed to work on.

"Whether it's a sensible thing to try to increase lifespan this way is another matter; perhaps increasing health span rather than overall lifespan might be a better goal."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8139816.stm



Bizzare story

[decim]

The reason it is called Easter Island?

[cornilouse]

maybe, the news on tel Lie Vision are reporting as the potential exlixer of life..



they are saying that the immune system suffers greatly though, so maybe the immune system is something artificially created and built up using modern medication to keep us from living longer


maybe

[supertzar]

Maybe this is why the builders of the heads liked the location.

[autosuggestion]

there is absolutely no way, if this drug legitimately expanded lifespan, that they would market it to people, since they are so desperately trying to reduce population!

[3stepsahead]

they promised to reduce 50% carbon emission by 2050
and often , population reduction is mentioned-for example by making pregnancy illegal for a period.

i think they aim to kill half of the people:eek:

[hawk]

Since it can render the immunity of a person's body then that means if a person were to become ill, say from cancer, and had a bone marrow transplant, then it is supposed to help with new bone marrow not being rejected. Right?
It doesn't sound safe to me, I think they should leave it alone. I don't care how long a person is supposed to live, you cannot fight death and old age.

[elysiumfire]

The ageing process of the human body is naturally related to cell replication, and it has been discovered that cells have a limited nuber of times they can replicate, after which they enter into the phase of senescence (they begin to age).
Think of the senescence process like this...let's say you have a 12" square piece of material in your hands, whose molecular structure always without fail returns the material to pristine flatness and strength after you have scrumpled it up into a ball. However, it can only do this for a number of times, let's say ten, after which, on the 11th time it doesn't snap back into its former condition, but slowly unravels towards it, with resulting evidence of curling at the corners. The more times we scrumple it into a ball, the slower it gets returning to position, but showing even more damage. Eventually, it no longer unfolds from the ball.

This 'limit' of returning to pristine condition is named the 'Hayflick limit', named after Leonard Hayflick, who discovered in 1962 that cell replication has a limit, after which the cell enters into the senescence process and eventually dies. Of course our cells are dying and being replaced all the time, but as we age, the process of cell replication enters whole bodily synchronized senescenece. We can visualize it like this...if we allow ourselves to perceive the whole human species as a body, and that each human is a cell of that body, we know that there is a ratio relation between people born (replication), and people who die (cell death). If the ratio of this relationship was to enter a greater magnitude towards people dying (synchronized senescenece), then eventually, the human species would be come extinct.

Apart from the Hayflick limit, there are a number of other factors to be taken into consideration regarding ageing, such as environmental factors, life style, food intake, disease, etc, but although prior to Hayflick, it was thought that cells were immortal, and that they would continue to replicate exact pristine copies of the original cell indefinitely, we now know that only cancer cells can do this because they circumnavigate the Hayflick limit by maintaining activation of 'telomeres' - strands of DNA on the ends of chromosomes that act as buffers to protect the strand, likened to the tips on shoelaces to stop them from unravelling. Everytime the cell replicates, the cell's telomere replicates shorter than the previous cell, until it reaches the Hayflick limit, at which point the cell enters senescenence. Disregarding all other influential variables for why we age, this is the somatic reason for why we do so.

For to develop a 'elixur of youth', it would seem that we only need to maintain activation of the telomeres, but it doesn't work like that, continued activation beyond the naturally set limit encounters runaway replication, uncontrollabe and extremely damaging to the whole organism...in other words, cancers. For whatever reason, nature has made it so that individual members of the human race do not live forever, are not made immortal, and that the only process for the continuation of our species is highly controlled by our birthing and dying.

The philosophical implications of Nature's reason are entirely known only to Nature herself.