Start the prevention of aging in advance
The fight against the negative effects of aging is increasingly becoming the subject of attention of researchers. Lifestyle changes can improve the health of the elderly, but this is not enough to prevent diseases of the elderly. Repurposing existing drugs for geroprotection is one of the ways to prevent age-related changes.
Currently, the most promising anti–aging agent is rapamycin, a cell growth inhibitor and immunosuppressant, which is used in cancer therapy and after organ transplantation. At the doses recommended for these conditions, rapamycin carries the risk of undesirable effects, but when using the drug to prevent age-related changes, they should be absent or minimal. A research team from the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging in Cologne, Germany, found out when and for how long you need to take rapamycin to achieve the same effect as lifelong treatment.
Only short-term exposure
The researchers tested different time intervals for the start of short courses of rapamycin in fruit flies and found that 2-week treatment of young adult insects protected them from age-related pathology in the intestine and prolonged life. In young mice, the corresponding short period of time, 3 months of treatment, starting from the age of 3 months, had a similar beneficial effect on intestinal health by the time they reached middle age.
This short-term drug treatment at a young age provided as strong protection as continuous treatment started at the same time. In addition, treatment with rapamycin had the greatest effect when prescribed at an earlier age compared with the start of therapy in middle age. When flies were treated with rapamycin at the end of life, it had no effect at all.
The prospects
Thus, researchers have found a way to bypass the need for long-term use of rapamycin, and it will become more convenient to use in humans. Now it is important to find out whether the geroprotective effect of rapamycin can be achieved in mice and humans when starting treatment at a later age, since ideally the treatment period should be minimized.
Article by P.Juricic et al. Long-lasting geroprotection from brief rapamycin treatment in early adulthood by persistently increased intestinal autophagy is published in the journal Nature Aging.
Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru according to the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging: Brief exposure to rapamycin has the same anti-aging effects as lifelong treatment.