Phytotherapeutic geroprotector
Hunger hormone slowed down the aging of the body of mice, scientists say
RIA News Japanese molecular biologists have found that stimulating the production of ghrelin, one of the hunger hormones, slowed down the aging of the body, brain and blood vessels in mice who ate rikkunshito – a popular Japanese folk remedy for stomach pain, according to an article published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Increased ghrelin signaling prolongs survival in mouse models of human aging through activation of sirtuin1).
Experiments conducted on worms, mice and a number of other animals back in the 60s of the last century showed that reducing the number of calories in the diet significantly prolongs the life of animals. Over the following decades, biologists have identified dozens of genes and hormones potentially involved in this phenomenon, but none of them have been able to learn how to use to prolong the life of humans or these same animals.
In recent years, as Akio Inui from Kagoshima University tells (in the Hungry Japanese mice age slower - VM press release), two of them have begun to attract special attention of scientists – the hormone ghrelin, associated with hunger and satiety, and the SIRT1 gene associated with this substance and the body's reactive reaction for stress.
As previous experiments have shown, the "insertion" of additional copies of SIRT1 into the genome of mice significantly prolonged their lives and slowed down brain aging, but scientists failed to achieve such an effect using ghrelin itself. At best, it was possible to do the opposite – artificially age the mouse by blocking the synthesis of ghrelin.
Relatively recently, Inui and his colleagues discovered that the assembly of ghrelin molecules in the body can be stimulated using the Japanese folk remedy rikkunshito, made from the roots of the plant Atractylodes lancea. This drug contains the substance atractilodine, which stimulates nerve cells in the intestine to produce ghrelin molecules.
The authors of the article decided to test how regular intake of riccuncito and atractilodine can affect the life expectancy of animals. To do this, they raised several mice whose genome contained mutations that accelerated the aging process, and tested whether a traditional drug could restrain their senility, as well as prolong the life of rodents from the control group.
Most of these mice die for 2-3 months of life due to degeneration of all body tissues, but taking riccuncito noticeably slowed down this process, prolonging their life by an average of 10-20 days for one set of genes, and 100-200 days for another "version" of accelerated aging.
A similar pattern was observed among rodents from the control group, whose average life expectancy was increased by about 40%. All this was due to the fact that taking riccuncito or its active substance increased the activity of SIRT1 by about 20-40%.
A diagram from the article by Ebner et al. Highlights from the 7th Cachexia Conference: Muscle wasting pathophysiological detection and novel treatment strategies // J Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle (2014) – VM.
As often happens, the results of such experiments are not confirmed in clinical trials on volunteers or in experiments on monkeys, and therefore it is worth waiting for them first, rather than trying to prolong your life with Atractylodes lancea tincture or other components of the Japanese drug.
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03.02.2015