Longevity Gene Found

quixote9 writes "Calorie restriction while maintaining nutrient levels has long been known to dramatically increase life spans. Very different lab animals, from worms to mice, live up to 50% longer (or even more) on the restricted diets. However, so far, nobody has been able to figure out how this works. Scientists at the Salk Institute have found a specific gene in worms (there's a very similar one in people) that is directly involved in the longevity effect. That opens up the interesting possibility that doctors may someday be able to activate that gene directly and we can live long and prosper . . . without giving up chocolate."

Comments

People demand it

[ch-chuck]

Give me immortality, or give me death!

OTOH

[Virtual_Raider]

I am of two minds on this. I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect and I would want my loved ones (and everyone in the world for that matter) to have it too. But if according to the wikipedia we are well over SIX THOUSAND MILLION people alive at the moment, the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.

Re:OTOH

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Don't worry about it. Market forces will make it such that only the richest 3% of the population can afford the treatment.

Re:OTOH

[pipatron]

Please check http://www.vhemt.org/ for a better solution than dying.

Re:OTOH

[vidarh]

Birth rates are already well below maintenance levels in most industrialized countries, and even China is set to see it's population peak soon due to the one child policy. The solution to the problem of too high growth is helping developing countries out of poverty.

We're maybe as little as a century away from actually seeing the worlds population shrinking unless we start increasing lifespans a lot faster than we have.

Re:OTOH

[teslar]

(...) the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.

Well, that's the thing, we won't stop dying - we'll only stop dying of old age. There's still plenty of accidents and murders to keep the population under control. Also, I'm pretty sure that if you could actually have eternal life, you'll get bored of it eventually and will top yourself given that nature's no longer doing the job for you. And I'll bet that would happen before your 200th birthday.

I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect

I guess not all long lives are the same - having the body of a 20 year old for 100 years instead of, well, one is one thing, having the body of a 150 year old who would normally have died 80 years ago for 100 years is quite another. So be careful what you wish for when you ask for longer lifespans. Make sure you read the fine print first :)

Re:OTOH

[khallow]

Also, I'm pretty sure that if you could actually have eternal life, you'll get bored of it eventually and will top yourself given that nature's no longer doing the job for you. And I'll bet that would happen before your 200th birthday.

Either that, or after 200 years, they'll have figured out how to not be bored. Frankly, it's not that hard.

Re:OTOH

[syntaxglitch]

What is "Mainainence level"? Maintaining social security? Or maintaining rate of growth?

Maintaining raw population, meaning a growth rate greater than or equal to zero. Many first-world nations (notably, Japan and much of Europe) have more people dying than being born, resulting in negative population growth.

In general, education level and availability of technology correlate negatively with birth rate, and this holds true both between countries and between socio-economic groups within countries.

Retirement age..

[rf0]

If we do live longer to say 150 and you retire at say 70 would you really want to spend 80 years doing nothing..

Re:Retirement age..

[MadCow42]

Well, "retirement age" is just a reflection of what point in your life you become:

1) able to financially support yourself for the rest of your life without continuing to work, and

2) possibly no longer valuable in the workforce (i.e. too expensive for the quality/quantity of work you can contribute)

Living longer would mean you need more money to support yourself in retirement, or that you need to delay retiring. The second point depends on what health state (and mental state) you're in at an older age.

Personally, I plan to retire as soon as possible - but there's no way I could support myself and wife/etc. for 80+ years on what I've saved to date!

MadCow.

Gene sequence in hex is...

[Bob54321]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

(That is going to hurt my karma but I am still no bored of that joke...)

(OK, maybe a little over it)

Ponce de León still searching...

[Door in Cart]

Our current life expectancy is already putting such a burden on our social security system. When will people realize that quality of life != quantity of life? How is our great-grandkids' generation supposed to support millions of supercentenarians?

tinfoil response

[u-bend]

How long do we really want these worms to live? Till they become sentient long-lived invertebrate overlords?

Who Doesn't Wan't More Time?

[knapper_tech]

If I could get a few more years earlier in life while I still have gobs of energy and relatively no responsibilities... Suddenly four years for a degree wouldn't seem like a huge investment. A year of study abroad in Japan wouldn't be an issue. I might have two hobbies. Long term investments would make more sense. I would take more time to learn more things, aquire more skills, and experience a broader life.

In short, I think living longer would make it a lot easier to live sensibly. As it is, if I have to weight the risks of investing time or taking something I can do now, I end up taking the most courageous and risky courses possible.

I don't think it's a relative thing either. Not in the sense that, regardless of whatever time-span I had, I would always wish, "Wow, if only I had twice as much." In an absolute sense, I just don't think I'll ever have the years to do all the things I want to. It makes it seem really pointless to invest eight years into something (for instance, undergrad + med-school) when it's such a large investment that, by the time I get done, I will have lost many opportunities of youth, but I couldn't put such a thing off because, who wants to invest eight years in something that will only pay off for twenty?

Humanity is robbed. People live crazy lives because we are going to die too soon to live fully, so life is futile. Damn whatever you recognize as the determining factor of our longevity. The light is green to research like this.

Population control, NOW!

[Knutsi]

It's not the drugs that are the problem, it's our never-ending population growth! The more land we turn into farmland, the more kids we have, that again will need to turn new land into farmland, or squeeze even more out of what is allready there to stay alive, and have more kids that needs more farmland... and so on, so forth...

Seriously, we know that we will crack the secrets to long life at one point or another. We know that we want to maintain a high standards of living, and achieve self-realiszation. We want there to be wild nature left. We want there to be more species that rats, cockroaches, dogs and cats living alongside us.

It doesn't take a genious to see that a major pieces in the puzzle that is our long-term survival is population control, and we need to enact it now. Global warming is a small piece in comparison.

To those who wish to endulge, I'd stornly reccomend Daniel Quinn's excellend books 'Ishmael', and 'The Story of B'.

Re:Population control, NOW!

[drsmithy]

It doesn't take a genious to see that a major pieces in the puzzle that is our long-term survival is population control, and we need to enact it now.

We've been doing it since the dawn of time. It's called war.

They all got it wrong

[aadvancedGIR]

Healthy food does not prolonge life, it just make it seem so long and boring you want to die.

Interesting similarities

[mapkinase]

BBC article has a link to another BBC article about an example of a man who followed this diet:

On a typical day, I will eat an oatmeal-based recipe for breakfast, which is about 455 calories and it gives me about half of my daily nutrients.

I don't eat lunch - after this breakfast I just don't feel hungry - so that leaves me about 1,350 calories for my evening meal, which is a lot.

This is very close to the dieting of the Muslims when they fast (obligatory fast during Ramadhan or voluntary fast during the month of Sha'ban, on Mondays and Thursdays, on 13,14 and 15th of each Islamic month or other recommended days).

We have a breakfast (Suhur) before dawn and do not eat or drink until sunset. After sunset we have a usual meal (Iftar). The only difference to the diet described in this BBC article is that we do not drink while Mr. Cavanaugh does.

abstract of original article

[mapkinase]

Abstract of original article in Nature:

Reduced food intake as a result of dietary restriction increases the lifespan of a wide variety of metazoans and delays the onset of multiple age-related pathologies. Dietary restriction elicits a genetically programmed response to nutrient availability that cannot be explained by a simple reduction in metabolism or slower growth of the organism. In the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the transcription factor PHA-4 has an essential role in the embryonic development of the foregut and is orthologous to genes encoding the mammalian family of Foxa transcription factors, Foxa1, Foxa2 and Foxa3. Foxa family members have important roles during development, but also act later in life to regulate glucagon production and glucose homeostasis, particularly in response to fasting. Here we describe a newly discovered, adult-specific function for PHA-4 in the regulation of diet-restriction-mediated longevity in C. elegans. The role of PHA-4 in lifespan determination is specific for dietary restriction, because it is not required for the increased longevity caused by other genetic pathways that regulate ageing.

The paper has a supplement PDF which unfortunately you won't be able to see unless your institution is subscribed to Nature. The figure S2 in it is an alignment of PHA-4 protein product to 3 most similar proteins in human. Some domains called forkhead are 85% identical, but really good alignment covers only about 90 of 506 residues of PHA-4 protein product. From my experience with proteins that qualify as orthologs, this alignment does not qualify. Homologene does not have a family of orthologs containing that worm product as well.

It does not mean that FOXA family does not do something for our longer lives, it just mean that article does not prove that via sequence similarity. Since I enjoy "trolling" I would add that (once again) Nature capitalizes on the subject importance and publishes articles with overstretching conclusions.

Re:Earlier death

[tomhudson]

"You can have my extended life gene when you pry it from my cold dead hands."

Seriously, if you want to extend life, ban fructose as a sweetener. Unlike regular sugar, fructose blocks the hormones that make you "feel full" so you continue eating and drinking (esp. soda pop). 2/3 of the population is overweight, and a LOT of those are obese. Of course, a fructose ban would result in lower sales of all junk foods (because you'll "feel full" sooner), so expect it to be fought by the manufacturers, who're just fattening you up fo the slaughter.

Re:Who would want to live forever?

[tomhudson]

3 men in an old-age home were comparing notes.

The 70-year-old said that he needs to go to the toilet first thing in the morning, and it takes him 10 minutes just to get out of bed, and another half-hour in the can, so he has to get up at 6:30 if he's going to make it for breakfast at 7:00

The 80-year-old said "You think that's bad? It takes me half an hour to get out of bed, and an HOUR in the toilet, so I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning if I'm going to eat breakfast at 7:00. Heck, I have to take half a viagra so I don't end up pissing on my slippers!

The 90-year-old says "You young'uns ... I wake up at 6:55, have a piss, take a shit, and I'm all done by 7:00 ... then I have breakfast, while they change my sheets."

Re:Earlier death

[tomhudson]

All sugars promote tooth decay.

Also http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=65470, http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/89/6 /2963, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/05050 3152956.htm

Fructose depresses leptin and insulin levels. Leptin is normally produced when you eat, and this triggers the "ok, I'm no longer hungry" signal in your brain so you stop eating. Lowering the leptin level causes you to still feel hungry, even after you've eaten. Switching from fructose to sucrose will allow your body to regulate itself better.

Its probably going to take some major lawsuits (and bankruptcies) to fix this problem ...

worms and caloric restriction: the dauer effect

[sbruinsma]

Interesting study, but I'm always a bit leery of aging studies done in these worms (C. elegans), especially those which involve caloric restriction. Worms have the ability to follow an entirely different developmental path under certain conditions. Thus, normally, worms progress to adulthood and live a couple weeks. But if they are STARVED, at a young stage they shift into what is called a "dauer" state--they stop growing and can live for months and months. This is totally different than just living longer or stopping aging at a normal state--they are entering an entirely different developmental stage, which they normally would never see. Humans, of course, have no such developmental path. So with aging studies dealing with caloric restriction in worms, you have to wonder if they're studying something relevant to mammals, or if they are manipulating this worm-specific dauer pathway. It almost seems more likely to me that they would be affecting something to do with this dauer state. It will be interesting to see what happens when they follow up in mice.

Re:Earlier death

[pla]

Seriously, if you want to extend life, ban fructose as a sweetener. Unlike regular sugar, fructose blocks the hormones that make you "feel full"

So people still fall for this one, eh?

Newsflash - Plain ol' table sugar (aka "sucrose") contains nearly the same amount of fructose as that big-bad-boogeyman, High Fructose Corn syrup!

Sucrose has a 50/50 mix of fructose and dextrose, while HFC contains from 43 to 55% fructose.


But by all means, keep blaming American's fat asses on HFC rather than admitting that we simply eat way too much and exercise way too little...

Re:Earlier death

[steelfood]

Sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose

HFCS in foods is largely 90/10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_sy rup

Only in sports drinks is the glucose content of HFCS higher than that of in sucrose.

The wikipedia article also mentions that the most common sweetener for processed foods and soft drinks is HFCS 55 (55/45), which isn't much greater in fructose content than the 50/50 of sucrose. However, they don't mention whether HFCS 90 or HFCS 55 is cheaper to process, which would make that the more prevalent variety. Regardless, it's safe to assume that HFCS foods have more fructose than if they were to have used sugar instead.

I'm not disagreeing that obesity is a result of eating too much and exercising too little. But what we eat also contributes to our health. And consuming large amounts of HFCS through processed foods doesn't help.