I don't recommend it...
Castration for longevity
This is Shrek – the most famous merino sheep of New Zealand, famous for having managed to avoid a haircut for six years. When he was finally caught, 27 kilograms of wool were cut off from him. Less well-known is the fact that Shrek was a vulture, i.e. a castrate, and lived up to 16 years.
"By the time Shrek was caught, he was already 10 years old – this is about the maximum age of the longest-lived sheep on a commercial farm. I think at least part of Shrek's fame was simply that he lived so long – which almost certainly wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been castrated," says Dr Tim Hoare from the University of Otago.
A group of scientists from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and their colleagues from other scientific centers proved that castration of male sheep, i.e. rams, slows down the aging of their DNA. According to the researchers, the same applies to human males, i.e. men.
"Both farmers and scientists have long noticed that castrated sheep live much longer on average than their full-bodied counterparts; however, this is the first time someone has looked at DNA to figure out whether it ages slower in this case, too," says Victoria Sugrue, researcher at the University of Otago and lead author of an article about the study published in the journal eLife (Castration delays epigenetic aging and feminizes DNA methylation at androgen-regulated loci).
"We have developed a way to measure biological age in a wide range of mammals – we examined more than 200 species and found an amazing commonality in how animals age," said the co–author of the study Steve Horvath, professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. "But the sheep study is unique because it paid special attention to how male hormones affect aging."
Horvath is the author of a biochemical epigenetic test that can be used to measure age. The test shows the level of methylation, a biological process that has been found to play a key role in aging.
"We found that males and females of sheep have very different DNA aging patterns; and that in the valukhs (castrated sheep), despite the fact that they are males, certain sections of DNA are characterized as completely female," explained Tim Hore, co-head of the research group and Otago teacher.
"It is interesting," Dr. Khor added, "that the areas most affected by castration are also associated with male hormone receptors in humans, and with a much higher frequency than it could be if it were an accident. This indicates a clear link between castration, male hormones and sex differences in DNA aging."
Sheep are not the cheapest experimental material, so the researchers studied the effect of the level of sex hormones on various organs and tissues in mice. The result is as follows: in the tissues where male hormone receptors were found (for example, skin, kidneys and brain), there were large differences between the aging patterns of DNA in males and females. On the contrary, tissues without the expression of male hormone receptors looked the same in both.
Of course, the researchers do not propose to castrate men for the sake of longevity, but they hope that the epigenetic clocks they developed to determine the biological age of sheep may be useful in animal husbandry. In addition, the authors suggest that the study of the role of male hormones in the aging process will continue.
From the 17th to the 19th century, male singers were castrated from time to time to stop puberty and the associated voice breaking. Castrato singers possessed voices inaccessible to ordinary men (usually soprano and contralto), combined with the power of adult male lungs. Many of them became celebrities. However, were they any special centenarians? The famous Farinelli lived 77 years. One of the last castrato singers Alessandro Moreschi, the only one whose voice is recorded on a phonograph, is only 64 years old. Giambattista (Giovanni Battista Vellutti), considered the last great castrato, lived for 81 years – and this surprised many, but perhaps only because in his old age he devoted himself to agriculture, lived in seclusion and many considered the once brilliant artist to have been dead for a long time, when suddenly it was announced that he had died. If we look away from the singers and look at the years of life of other famous eunuchs (offhand, Origen is 69 years old, Abelard is 63 years old, Admiral Zheng He is 64 years old), we also will not see outstanding centenarians among them. In general, of course, we do not have statistics, but at first glance it seems that the pattern studied on sheep does not transfer very well to humans, despite some coincidences in DNA methylation patterns.
The illustration is a fragment of a portrait of Farinelli by Jacopo Amigoni (circa 1752).
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