There’s continued interest in the science of slower aging – not least because so many health problems, from dementia and vision loss to cancer and osteoporosis, become more prevalent in our later years.
With this in mind, a team led by researchers from the University of Michigan wanted to see if there might be a common thread in anti-aging treatments in mice, something chemical or biological that they all had in common.
And it turns out – there is.
Across five different treatments that are already known to extend lifespan in mice, the researchers found that higher levels of the natural substance ergothioneine were a consistent theme.
We might be able to develop anti-aging therapies more quickly if we know one of the main shared characteristics.
“The pace of aging can be delayed by mutations, dietary manipulations, and drugs, yet the metabolic mechanisms underlying longevity interventions remain poorly understood,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“These findings reveal tissue-specific metabolic reprogramming shared across mechanistically distinct longevity interventions.”
The researchers rotated through the five different treatments in groups of four, using an AI analysis program to spot consistent patterns in mouse biology – patterns which were then used to see if the AI could spot the fifth treatment based on its chemical signatures.
In 33 of the 35 tests, the AI was able to correctly distinguish mice given the fifth, missing treatment from untreated mice. The five studied included the drugs rapamycin, acarbose, canagliflozin, and 17α-estradiol, as well as caloric restriction.
“Because all five interventions extend male lifespan, this implies that validated anti-aging drugs produce sets of tissue-specific changes that resemble changes induced by other drugs in this class, as well as by calorie-restricted mice,” write the researchers.
Ergothioneine was the only molecule to rank as a top marker in more than two tissue types, and it increased in the brains and blood of the mice across all five treatments. Ergothioneine comes from fungi, including mushrooms, and animals get it through their diet.
It’s a promising common trend, but it’s not without its caveats.
There’s no direct evidence of cause and effect, and as the study didn’t include mice given treatments that don’t extend lifespan, we can’t be sure exactly what’s leading to these changes.
“It is possible that the patterns seen, in whole or in part, are produced whenever a mouse is exposed to chronic drug or dietary intervention,” write the researchers.
“We think this is unlikely, but we are currently extending this work to include comparisons of mice given anti-aging drugs to mice given drugs known not to alter mouse lifespan, to test this idea more carefully.”
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That further research will be helpful – and right now scientists only have data on mice – but the hope is that eventually scientists could look at a biomarker like ergothioneine to weigh up the effectiveness of anti-aging treatments more quickly.
While the chemical changes in the bodies of the mice were different for all five treatments, the suggestion is that there might be some overlap in terms of how lifespan is extended. Bearing that in mind, the study also noted some similarities across the treatments when it came to shifts in how body fat was managed.
Right now we don’t know exactly what ergothioneine might or might not be doing to extend lifespan, but it’s an interesting way into the fundamental biological changes that slow down aging.
The rate at which our bodies wear out and become more vulnerable to disease and ill health is affected by a whole host of factors, so finding any kind of consistent patterns in treatments will be useful for researchers.
“The search for drugs that postpone or decelerate human aging might be facilitated by the use of plasma metabolic profiles to learn which drugs produce changes similar to those seen in slow-aging mice, once the specificity of these signatures for lifespan extension has been established,” write the researchers.
The research has been published in Frontiers in Aging.
This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
