Tag: Anti Aging

The hormone oxytocin – associated with childbirth, sex and social attachments – is also essential for muscle maintenance and repair, researchers have found. But an animal experiment found that it declines with age.

The new study, published) in the journal Nature Communications, indicates that oxytocin, if it could be administered to humans, could eventually be a treatment for age-related muscle wasting, or sarcopenia.

The discovery is especially significant because oxytocin is already approved by the Food and Drug Admnistration for use in people.

The notion that a protein called SIRT1 is a powerful regulator of aging has been highly debated, but its connection to the health of blood stem cells “is now clear,” according to Saghi Ghaffari, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Developmental and Regenerative Biology at Mount Sinai’s Black Family Stem Cell Institute, Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. “Identifying regulators of stem cell aging is of major significance for public health because of their potential power to promote healthy aging and provide targets to combat diseases of aging,” Dr. Ghaffari said.

Metformin, the world’s most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows aging and increases lifespan. That is the finding of Wouter De Haes and colleagues at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and reported in June 2014 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to a release from the university, the researchers teased out the mechanism behind metformin’s age-slowing effects: the drug causes an increase in the number of toxic oxygen molecules released in the cell and this, surprisingly, increases cell robustness and longevity in the long term.

Researchers have devised an algorithm that can help in the ongoing search for anti-aging drugs.

The scientists, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Genetics.

In their investigation, the researchers compared the cells of young and elderly patients, focusing on signaling pathways. The pathways play a crucial part in a process that ultimately results in either normal or pathological changes in cells.

Here's another video from our Third Age collection. Press play to start learning. 

A first of its kind atomic level look at the enzyme telomerase may “unlock the secrets to the fountain of youth”, according to scientists at Arizona State University in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. The study was published on May 4^th 2014 in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.