Hoarding is to blame for old age

Yulia Smirnova, "Science and Life"

Vadim Gladyshev, a professor at Harvard University Medical School, presented his new synthetic theory of aging at the conference "Biomedical Innovations for Health and Longevity" held in St. Petersburg, organized by IVAO.

Vadim Gladyshev at the conference "Biomedical innovations for health and longevity". Photo IVAO.

Aging is, without exaggeration, one of the biggest mysteries of biology. Experts cannot come to a consensus on why it occurs and why, in the end, the body can die, as they say, from old age. Some refer to genes, others to the fact that we are all programmed to die anyway, others say that after reproduction, the body has actually fulfilled its function and should make room for others. Professor Gladyshev offers for consideration his theory of deleterious (from the English deleterious – harmful), based on the cumulative effect of problems accumulating in the body, which eventually lead to death.

According to one of the common definitions, old age is the period of life from the loss of the ability to reproduce to death, but the gradual increase in mortality begins much earlier. Moreover, some organisms manage not to age. "How do we know if the body is aging or not? There are species in which mortality increases with age, for example, as in humans, where this indicator increases exponentially from the age of 15. And there are those who do not, for example, hydra, or bacteria that simply divide in half," says Professor Vadim Gladyshev. A few years ago, his laboratory deciphered the genome of one of the most mysterious animals in terms of life expectancy – the African rodent naked digger. Recently we wrote that ugly animals are studied less. With all confidence, we can say that naked diggers, for all their specific appearance, are not deprived of the attention of gerontologists.

There is a pattern according to which the larger the animal, the longer it lives. A naked digger is knocked out of this rather slender row – being the size of a mouse and weighing only 30 grams, he manages to live up to 32 years, and changing little with age, that is, demonstrating in every possible way the phenomenon of so-called negligible aging. On the other hand, the larger the body, the more cells it has, which means that there is a greater chance that cancer will develop at some point (and this is one of the main age-dependent diseases not only in humans, but also in mammals), well, or something will go at all not like that. But, surprisingly, the largest mammals, such as whales or elephants, live a long time, for example, one bowhead whale lived to 211 years. This phenomenon is known as the Peto paradox. Based on what scientists know about aging today, we can say that each long-lived species has its own adaptive mechanisms that allow it to live for a long time in certain environmental conditions. Naked diggers – underground, whales – in the cold ocean, and elephants in the hot savannas.

But is there still some general law of nature, according to which, in the end, everyone dies? Vadim Gladyshev believes that the theories available today describe one side of the problem - the weakening of DNA's ability to repair, the accumulation of mutations, evolutionarily programmed death, and so on. But perhaps the causes of aging need to be sought at a deeper level, at the level of the physical and chemical properties of biological molecules and processes, all of which are somewhat imperfect. With age, their consequences accumulate, and as a result, all this biological entropy leads to the fact that the body simply cannot live anymore. In an article devoted to a detailed description of this theory, which was recently published in the journal Aging cell (Aging: progressive decline in fitness due to the rising deleteriome adjusted by genetic, environmental, and stochastic processes), the author gives a very clear comparison of the aging of a living organism with the life of a car. Depending on the manufacturer's company and the brand of the car (genetics and population characteristics), on which roads the car drives (lifestyle), on the brand of fuel (food) and other factors, different cars can stay on the move for different times.

But we are primarily interested in ourselves. So what determines how long we will live? According to Professor Gladyshev, this is influenced by three factors. Although a person is a single biological species, but still polymorphism is quite pronounced within this species. That is, some people, due to various genetic reasons, simply age faster, while others age slower. In addition, we are susceptible to environmental influences: smoking, fatty foods, stress and other factors. And the third factor is random events. We all have mutations constantly occurring in the genome, but for some they lead to the shutdown of the desired gene, and for others they affect parts of the genome that are not responsible for some important functions. There are such genetic lucky ones.

In conditions close to ideal, the average life expectancy of a person is 80-85 years. In exceptional cases, people live up to 120 years and even a little more – the oldest inhabitant of our planet, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Kalman, was 122 years old when she died. But Vadim Gladyshev believes that there is no physical limit to prolonging human life: "We are the same living organisms as mice or worms, which have already learned to prolong life for a fairly significant period. So we have a chance. I do not know when it will be, and how much it will be possible to prolong a person's life, but it is possible."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  16.05.2016