NEW YORK: A team of scientists including one Indian may have cracked the mystery of aging, according to a study published in the scientific journal 'Nature' on Wednesday. They discovered a chemical dubbed NF-B in a small gland in the brain of mice which appears to trigger off the aging process. This discovery could open the doors for combating diseases of old age and extending lifespan.
The scientists work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York. Led by Dongsheng Cai, professor of molecular pharmacology, the team includes Sudershana Purkayastha, a post-doctoral investigator from Kolkata.
"It's clear from our study that many aspects of aging are controlled by the hypothalamus. What's exciting is that it's possible - at least in mice - to alter signalling within the hypothalamus to slow down the aging process and increase longevity," said Dongsheng Cai in a statement.
The hypothalamus, an almond-sized structure located deep within the brain, is known to have fundamental roles in growth, development, reproduction, and metabolism.
"As people age," he said, "you can detect inflammatory changes in various tissues. Inflammation is also involved in various age-related diseases, such as metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, neurological disease and many types of cancer." Over the past several years, Dr Cai and his research colleagues showed that inflammatory changes in the hypothalamus can give rise to various components of metabolic syndrome (a combination of health problems that can lead to heart disease and diabetes).
Their work revealed that a protein complex called NF-B seemed to be involved in a key way in inflammation. In the current study, Dr Cai and his team demonstrated that increasing the activity of NF-B in mice significantly accelerated the development of aging.
"The mice showed a decrease in muscle strength and size, in skin thickness, and in their ability to learn - all indicators of aging. Activating this pathway promoted systemic aging that shortened the lifespan," Dr Cai said according to a college statement.
Conversely, Dr Cai and his group found that blocking the NF-B pathway in the hypothalamus of mouse brains slowed aging and increased median longevity by about 20 percent, compared to controls, the statement added.
The findings are "A major breakthrough in ageing research," according to David Sinclair, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, 'Nature' reported.
He says that a key finding is that blocking the effects of NF-B produced anti-aging effects even when it was done in middle age. "If we're going to translate this research into medicines that can help people, clearly we cannot start very early in life."
Still, it is a long way to go before the research can be made available for humans. Extensive research will have to be done on mice and then on humans, to clearly establish that the same pathway works in humans. However, scientists see this as a breakthrough because it is for the first time that a particular chemical pathway has been pinned down.
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