Cellular Compound May Increase Lifespan Without the Need For Strict Dieting

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Every day, our cells manufacture small amounts of a molecule that, in higher doses, might be the key to leading a longer, healthier life. A team of researchers has found that this molecule boosts the lifespan of worms by more than 50%, raising the possibility that it will increase human longevity. Dietary supplements that contain the molecule and allegedly build muscle are already on the market. The study drops a barbell on their use, however, by suggesting that the molecule may actually thwart muscle growth."

Comments

which

[faldore]

which dietary supplements contain the molecule?

Re:which

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketed to bodybuilders as 'Creatine Alpha-Ketoglutarate'. Just google for it.

Re:which

[Anonymous Coward]

which dietary supplements contain the molecule?

Spam.

It's what Slashdot serves and what you crave.

Re:which

[Anonymous Coward]

When you see this:

They hit the jackpot with the first molecule they tried

you know almost for sure that this is one of those rush-to-publish-first articles that will be retracted in a few years. That is, you're still better off just living a healthy lifestyle. And believe me, the elixir of life won't be discovered anytime soon and even when discovered won't be available to the likes of you.

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Living longer is unnatural! It's bad! But deflecting asteroids (we can't) and colonizing the universe (we won't) are perfectly natural!

Re:Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Space Nutter Central Command is a bit slow on the downmod tonight, what's the matter? New recruits not working out?

Re:Oh no!

[YoungManKlaus]

the problem is rather that people live way too long already to keep the current pension system running. So living longer also means you have to work longer (asuming you get to be 150, at least until 110).

TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

-ketoglutarate (-KG), an intermediate in a metabolic cycle that helps a cell extract energy from food -how hard is it to put a little more information in the summary?

oh right, this is about clickbait, not information...

This is as bad as the local news 'Tune in tonight to find out which foods could kill you'.....

-I'm just sayin'

Re:TFA

[esldude]

Oh I hate how the local news and some entertainment newsy shows have become. I have timed a few and they literally on one or two stories spend more time telling you about the story coming up than they do the story itself. As in, "Bruce Springsteen talks to us about his latest tour, and you will be surprised what he says." They do this 15 second spot 6 times and then the actual footage only takes about 80 seconds. Facepalm time for me. The medical breakthroughs like the subject of this slashdot thread are pretty bad. They if not talk it up an equal amount of time come very close. Seems much simpler to just do the darned story using twice the time being perhaps more than twice as informative without the repetitive preamble. But of course the object is keeping everyone interested in 5 different stories waiting on the one they care about. Not being informative.

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a great SNL sketch with Jerry Seinfeld that made fun of this. "The president's been shot... but president of what? Find out after the break."

Re:TFA

[adolf]

But of course the object is keeping everyone interested in 5 different stories waiting on the one they care about.

No. The objective is to keep everyone interested so that they can observe the advertising.

Depending on locale, there may be easy answers to this problem: NPR, PBS, BBC, CBC, [et cetera].

Re:TFA

[ananamouse]

Don't forget Pacifica, and they are on the web and have a nice iOS app.

Worms are a poor model

[radtea]

Humans live insanely long lives for mammals: twice the average. The average mammal lives a billion heartbeats, humans live two billion. "Heartbeats" are a convenient normalization that accounts pretty well for differences in size, etc.

There are fairly plausible evolutionary reasons for this. Grandparents are the primary mechanism by which culture is transmitted, so if your grandparents (or the grandparents of your close kin) lived a long time you would have a better chance of reproducing yourself, assuming cultural knowledge is useful in your local environment. And people with long-lived grandparents tend to be long-lived themselves, so the trait gets selected for.

As such, animal models for human aging are extremely hard to come by, and ones as distant as worms are very unlikely to produce results that are generalizable to humans. This is why so many things cure cancer in rats but have no effect on humans: rats will get cancer from a dirty look, so their cancers tend to be relatively easy to knock over. Cancers that survive all the clever molecular tricks humans throw at them are much harder nuts to crack.

We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans (not enough people have been starving themselves for long enough to tell) so this article is way, way out on a speculative limb. Good science, I'm sure, but the hook should be "Scientists learn something about metabolic control pathways" and not "You may live forever!"

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that people that come from families where everyone has kids young age faster. Myself my mom had me at 45. I'm aging slower. No one knows I'm 43. No gray hair, no balding beyond my widow's peak, young features.

I wonder if we started having kids later and later if it would extend youth?

Re:Worms are a poor model

[geekoid]

"We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans "
we do, and it doesn't.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[kamapuaa]

This would be an extraordinarily easy thing to data mine. The fact that no correlation has been found (even though people know other things about the children of older women, eg they are more likely to suffer from a number of conditions) leads me to believe there's no correlation.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Citation is needed here, and no, after looking through the primary google links what I have seen for calorie restriction more or less has meshed up with the basics behind these studies. What they did talk about failing in humans was that nifty molecule from grape skins that doesn't affect our species as well as mice and flatworms.

So besides a molecule specific study could you help us out here?

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Connie_Lingus]

yeah..."fairly plausible" reasons would have to include the creation of health science and maybe, you know, hospitals?

love em to death, but i don't see too many dolphin and bonobos building hospitals for their kin.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[seven of five]

We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans (not enough people have been starving themselves for long enough to tell)

With billions of people and many, many different kinds of diet, you'd think there'd be more than enough data to validate or falsify CR for humans. For example, prisoners fed near-starvation diets have not been observed to live an extra 50 years.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

Calorie restriction has been proven to improve all the indicators of good health. But there are no longitudinal studies which show increased life span in humans. For one thing, extremely few people are capable of limiting themselves to 1500 or 1200 calories for many years or decades. You have to eat very high quality food, which is time consuming lifestyle. Also, the lengths involved are pretty much beyond your typical studies. How many studies do you know of which have followed a cohort for 30+ or 50+ years? You can probably count those on two hands. There are many confounding variables, so you need long, large, high quality longitudinal studies, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Until then, we won't see strong evidentiary support (positive or negative) anytime soon.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans (not enough people have been starving themselves for long enough to tell)

With billions of people and many, many different kinds of diet, you'd think there'd be more than enough data to validate or falsify CR for humans. For example, prisoners fed near-starvation diets have not been observed to live an extra 50 years.

Neither do mice fed a starvation diet live longer. Only a calorically starved, but nutritionally plentiful diet. Such a diet is quite rare. The evolutionary imperative to eat is too strong. If you have nutritionally plentiful food, it is most likely that you have plenty of it, and most people will eat more. The caloric restriction that is effective in mice is quite stringent.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Near-starvation refers to calories. You'd still want a normal amount of nutrients. And third-world starvation diets aren't going to cut it.

2) In the animal studies you get the most benefit when doing CR from birth to death. If you start out at, say, mid-life, you get substantially less than half of the longevity benefit of animals on the diet from birth.

3) Disease? Mental health? Why would you believe prisoners, in a country which feeds them to near starvation, would be a good cohort? Prisoners in the modern U.S. are certainly not fed near starvation--they get between 2500 and 3000 calories per day. (http://www.jailmedicine.com/do-you-do-doubles-dont/)

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Calavar]

Nematodes and certain flatworms that have their gonads removed can live for twice the normal lifespan. Do eunuchs live to be 150 years old? No? Then I don't think aging studies in worms translate very well to humans. This paper is an interesting bit of insight into cellular metabolic processes, but the main factors that drive aging (metabolism, sex hormones) in worms seem to be only secondary factors in human aging. TFS's claim that this might translate to humans in a tangible way is overblown. It's just another piece of a puzzle that has millions of parts.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[ciderbrew]

It may do, and I'm not joining in.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[wonkey_monkey]

The fact that life expectancy has, by some accounts, doubled in less than 150 years makes me doubt that we're seeing evolution in action in this case.

The advancement of medical science might have something to do with it...

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

Well lets see. My great-grandfather did not have a child at 45. He was dead in his early 30s. Therefore, while you are technically right that having kids later in life would correlate with living longer, you probably see the potential flaw in your theory, e.i. those whose health is more vulnerable are more likely to die young. :p

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Anonymous Coward]

I also looked young at 43. Just hang in there, you'll catch up. Best advice for looking as young as you can: Don't smoke and don't spend a lot of time in the sun. Either of those will really show up in your face once you get into your fifties. I've never smoked but I've spent a lot of time outdoors. For years I scoffed at the aging, thinking that as long as I didn't get burned and used sunblock I wouldn't have to worry about. I was wrong.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[interkin3tic]

You don't seem to understand what worms are useful for. They have specific uses, you're knocking them for not being useful for all types of research. That's like saying a hammer is useless because it can't fuse fiber optic cables very well.

Studies in worms don't DIRECTLY translate to humans, which is why medicine doesn't attempt to do so. You find something basic in worms, you next see if it is true for mice. Then finally you see if it's true in humans.

Incredibly, this is directly stated in TFA:

There’s no guarantee that -KG will have the same effects on aging in people as it has in worms. And before researchers can even address that issue, they’ll have to figure out if the compound also extends the lives of laboratory organisms such as flies and mice.

The reason why worms are an awesome model for certain things is it costs pennies to grow thousands of them. I had a professor who calculated that doing a mutagenesis screen in mice (that is, get a mouse with a mutation in every gene) would cost as much money as 20 minutes of the Iraq war, which is of course an unfathomable amount of money for something silly like biomedical research that doesn't kill people. A mutagenesis screen in worms on the other hand might cost closer to 20 minutes of undergraduate tuition.

The same thing goes for drug screens like the one discussed. Mice have a lifespan of about 2 years. Worms have a lifespan of two to three weeks. You'd identify drugs that keep worms alive longer in a month, and you'd only need plates full of bacteria (the worms eat bacteria) to do so. Mice require food, water, cages, climate control, dedicated staff to clean the cages, and a 24/7 monitoring system. You'd need multiple mice for each drug you're testing, so if you test a thousand compounds, you'd need several thousand mice. And if you want to do a longevity screen, you'd need to keep those mice alive for years. That would be an idiotic waste of time and money.

Any researcher who should be trusted with a pipette would quickly determine that the correct way to identify drugs that could increase longevity would be to first identify drugs using worms, then test whether those drugs have the same effect in mice or higher more expensive vertebrates, then finally see if there's a way you could show that same effect in humans without waiting 100 years. This is exactly what they appear to be doing.

Re:Worms are a poor model

[cellocgw]

You don't seem to understand what worms are useful for. They have specific uses, you're knocking them for not being useful for all types of research. That's like saying a hammer is useless because it can't fuse fiber optic cables very well.

You're using it wrong. I have these highly classified papers courtesy of an anonymous person with the initials "E.S." which shows how to use a hammer to fuse fiber optics just fine!

Re:Worms are a poor model

[Calavar]

I understand why worms are used as research models. I'm not bashing the study, but complaining about TFS (not TFA), which does seem to imply that there will be applications for humans in the near future.

Boosterspice!!

[cowtamer]

From the Jinx Institute of Knowledge, of course! http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi...

Also, might be alpha-ketoglutarate

Re:Boosterspice!!

[hguorbray]

yeah it's funny (I accidentally posted as AC) when I pasted into the comment window the alpha symbol showed up fine, but it disappeared after hitting whatever character coding is inside the database UTF-8 perhaps?

-I'm just sayin'

Re:Boosterspice!!

[Narcocide]

It was pasted as UTF-8 from your browser because that is what the page is served with. It was then slaughtered on insertion into the slashdot database because the database tables are *not* stored in UTF-8. This is a very old bug in the slashdot code that I assume is not being fixed due to [reasons].

Riiight

[thisisauniqueid]

(1) So since it works in worms, it will work in humans? (2) And of course nature never thought of this before or tried this before. Reminds me of a TV character in the 80s (was it ALF? or Steve Urkel?) who was modifying car engines to get 200mpg. Trouble is, 500 miles down the road, the engine fell out of the car. (3) Maybe nature doesn't want us living for 200 years? See (2).

Re:Riiight

[geekoid]

1) Maybe, maybe not. Its a start to determine the mechanize. You need so sort of plausibility first.

2) irrelevant, and underline your lack of understanding of evolution and nature.

3) nature doesn't want anything. it does what it dos, and we tell it to fuck off, were going to hurtle people to the moon.

Don't anthropomorphise nature, she hates it:)

Re:Riiight

[R3d M3rcury]

nature doesn't want anything.

Yes it does. Plastic.

Re:Riiight

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Don't anthropomorphise nature, he hates that.

Re:Riiight

[TheRealMindChild]

That was Viki from Small Wonder

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

(3) Maybe nature doesn't want us living for 200 years?

Now so much "nature doesn't want us living for 200 years" as "after the age of reproduction, nature doesn't give a damn about you."

Re:Riiight

[Artifakt]

There appear to be serious survival advantages from having grandparents and such around to help with raising children and playing a general part in society. Healthy older people happen pretty commonly in even the most primative societies. What's unusual historically but often found in the present culture, is older people who become seriously unable to contribute to the lives of their descendents (or anyone else) and need massive resources, but still live for decades.
          But, this situation has little to do with evolutionary pressures. As far as those go, we see unusual longevity in several non-human species that are more than typically smart and social, such as elephants and various whales. (And remember, elephant society is for females and and young, with many males 'encouraged' not to stay with the herd - elephant longevity is as high as it is despite the rogue male factor, which probably reduces how much 'nature' can select for longevity.).
          Even if a life fom is beyond reproductive age, if they help keep their offspring and their descendents alive, they are protecting copies of their own genes which are likely to be in those descendents, so of course there's something for natural selection to use,

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get done laughing at this, take a read of "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins if you dare to know more.

I cringe every day at the amount of strongly science educated people who ask questions and imply that nature has some "Master-plan" which of course smacks of intelligent design. Intelligent design is not science, Intelligent design is a 'thinly veiled' political attempt to prove that the bible and christian creation myth is the un-assailable, unquestionable truth and that science that points to the origin of life on earth being a result of natural selection by the means of natural selection or asks questions to test it's truth value is naive, stupid, wrong or the work of the devil deceiving people into rejecting the teachings of the bible.

Any time you hear someone say something like "This is why ______ evolved, to solve this problem'.. come back here and re-read this comment, because even if the person saying it has PHD or whatever after their name, they are showing ignorance of this point, and possibly (though not always) have a hidden religious or political bias hidden in their thought process.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

dont confuse correlation and causation,

Dont confuse causation and effect.

Carry on playing!

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Or sometimes it's just a useful figure of speech, without anyone having to be ignorant or have an agenda.

A slightly easier way to diet to a longer life

[erice]

From TFA:

By studying the mitochondria from cow heart cells, the researchers found that -KG blocks ATP synthase, thus turning down the cell’s metabolism.

Funny. You know what happens when you turn a cell's metabolism? It burns few calories. If you don't reduce calorie intake you get fat and suffer from a variety of obesity related illness that might kill you earlier than if you had not started taking the medication.

So in exchange for a possibly longer life you get to eat little and do little. Surprise, surprise! That is just like Calorie Restriction, albeit without the consistency requirement. That means you might actually achieve some benefit for the sacrifice rather than making the sacrifice, not getting it quite right, and getting no benefit.

Still, this doesn't sound like the fountain of youth. More like a prolonged living death.

Re:A slightly easier way to diet to a longer life

[mythosaz]

Perfect health has always been the slowest possible way to die.

Re:A slightly easier way to diet to a longer life

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean an "Immortal Death"? - Go Illustria!

Unintended consequences

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

People who are eating this dietary supplement find all kinds of worms living in their guts living 50% longer.

Worms are a poor model

[Eris13]

Not so. Nematodes are used because they have a very fast life cycle and you can study multiple generations. Perfect for mitochondrial studies such as this and mitochondria are pretty much mitochondria no matter the species.

The summary is bad because its a c&p of TOA summary which seems to be just a pulp piece on various ageing research topics. That's not what the original paper was about. The original paper in Nature was kinda cool in itself. Simple summary - Nematodes lasted 70% longer when fed a ton of ÃZ±-KG. Some new areas to be studied, but nothing much to see here.

The Old Ways are the Good Ways

[PvtVoid]

I'll stick with the blood of the young, thank you very much.

Become a sloth, live longer

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn down your metabolism, slow the firing rate of synapses and reduce energy available for locomotion. Sounds like a long, crappy life to me.

Slashdot 101

[oldhack]

Science breakthrough, posted by samzenpus == LIE

Leto

[flyingfsck]

Looks like Frank Herbert had a prescient moment with the Dune series. Maybe that molecule will make us all turn into sand worms.

Re:Leto

[ColdWetDog]

These are definitely not the worms you are looking for.

Re:Leto

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Well, most slashdotters look kinda like Jabba already...

The problem with calorie restriction.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Foods-and-nutrition experts have known for decades that calorie restriction itself is a dead-end - and not for the reasons given so far in this article.

Turns out that, while calorie restriction does retard aging, it also retards the functionality of the immune system.

Calorie-restrict a rat in a lab, where it's protected from most pathogens, and it lives measurably longer and shows signs of aging later, in proportion. Calorie-restrict a rat exposed to an outdoor environment, and it dies young of disease.

This implies that, while there might be mechanisms of aging-retardation discoverable by examining the biochemistry behind calorie restriction and exploitable for life extension, calorie restriction regimes, by themselves, are likely to be counter-productive.

Re:The problem with calorie restriction.

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of a joke my father used to tell me:

" An experiment was performed in which scientists trained a frog to jump on command. Once the frog had been shown to jump on command 100% of the time,
The scientists amputated one of the frog's legs. When the frog recovered it still responded to the jump command to the surprise of the researchers. Once recovered completely the researchers proceeded to amputate another of the frog's legs, after which it jumped on command but with less agility. This trend continued until the researchers had amputated the frog's last remaining leg. Once this final amputation had been performed, the frog would no longer jump on command.

The scientists concluded that limbless frogs are deaf. "

Re:The problem with calorie restriction.

[arobatino]

Foods-and-nutrition experts have known for decades that calorie restriction itself is a dead-end - and not for the reasons given so far in this article.

Turns out that, while calorie restriction does retard aging, it also retards the functionality of the immune system.

Since most humans now live in an environment which is much more shielded than what we evolved in, and evolution hasn't had time to catch up, it's plausible that a tradeoff like that might be worthwhile.

Why would anyone want to increase their lifespan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to deal with medical issues for a longer period of time, who wants to be a corporate slave for a longer period of time, etc, etc.?

Great News

[ketomax]

A team of researchers has found that this molecule boosts the lifespan of worms by more than 50%

That is great news for the leeches of our society.

Alpha ketoglutarate is produced in copious...

[The Real Dr John]

quantities in every cell in your body. It is one of the tricarboxylic acid cycle (Kreb's cycle) intermediates produced from either the amino acid glutamate, or from isocitrate. It is not a limiting molecule in the Kreb's cycle, and giving it to humans will not have any effect on human longevity. As noted already, many bodybuilders take it every day because they think it will give them more energy. Worms and humans do not have similar life cycles. Many things that don't affect the longevity of humans increase the lifespan of worms. The research into making geriatric worms is really a waste of time and money.

One weird trick to live longer.

[wzinc]

Now we know; no need to click on those ads anymore!

ha ha "Nutriceuticals"

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me a sociopath with a Life Sciences PhD and I'll show you involvement in "Nutriceuticals".
What a load of unmitigated snake-oil shite.

Like all this "Wellness" bollocks that's coming out.
Scratch the "wellness" surface for a couple of minutes and you'll find some psycho not far below the surface.
Usually one that's pals with a Lawyer and/or a Venture Capitalist.

Just eat right and take exercise, people. There's no magic bullet.

It needs to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, eat that biochemiical. Then, when you die and are planted, them worms eating you will have long, healthy lives....

              mark