Has a miracle anti-aging drug actually arrived?

The ability to stick with anti-aging diets and medications so as to gain long-term health advantages in old age is at the foundation of practically all of these anti-aging treatments. Consider the well-known calorie restriction as an example. Researchers have discovered in a variety of experimental animals that almost all of the health advantages of following a diet for the majority of one's life vanish instantly the moment one stops.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany, in a research paper published in Nature Aging, showed that experimental animals given rapamycin for a short period of time in early adulthood were able to achieve a longer life span and a reduction in aging-related diseases.

Rapamycin has been used in clinical medicine for decades since its discovery to combat organ transplant rejection and treat cancer. In the last decade, researchers have found miraculous life-extending effects with rapamycin in a variety of experimental animals, from worms to rodents, and as a result this molecule is recognized by aging biologists as one of the most promising anti-aging drug candidates available. To achieve maximum anti-aging efficacy, research experts generally recommend lifelong use of this drug. However, long-term use will inevitably produce some side effects, while for most people taking the drug for life is difficult to maintain.

In this new study, the team of Professor Linda Partridge, one of the leading figures in the anti-aging community, has developed a short-term regimen of rapamycin that has shown similar effects on life extension and slowing of aging-related lesions as lifelong administration of the drug in fruit flies and mice.

The group tested rapamycin short-term feedings on fruit flies at various periods, then tracked changes in the flies' lifespan to determine the ideal dose window. They were taken aback to learn that feeding rapamycin for two weeks beginning shortly after adulthood led to the same lifespan extension as giving the medication continuously for more than two months. Comparing this short-term dosing strategy to long-term feeding of rapamycin, the team found that it was just as effective at postponing intestinal deterioration and lowering the incidence of intestinal tumors.

The scientists discovered that rapamycin therapy boosted the expression of numerous proteins linked to the cellular autophagy system and that these elevated expression levels persisted even after the drug withdrawal. In simple terms, this can be interpreted as the process of cellular use of lysosomes to remove waste and recycle waste becoming efficient, achieving cellular homeostasis and promoting cell survival. Further analysis also revealed that short-term rapamycin treatment induced a "memory" effect on signaling levels that was ultimately necessary to activate autophagic signaling in intestinal cells, rather than the histone/chromatin structural signaling pathway previously reported by the group.

The team then used mice to test a short-term rapamycin dosage regimen. Surprisingly, feeding young adult mice rapamycin for as little as 3 months resulted in identical "memory" effects. When different measures of intestinal health were evaluated on mice that were 12 months old, they exhibited the same improvement as the mice who had been given the drug for a long time.

Dr. Yuxuan Lv, a co-first author of this study, explained, "The development of suitable short-term treatment regimens for aging is the future trend, both in terms of safety, practicality, and economics. This short-term rapamycin regimen may be a blessing for the majority of people who are not willing to keep their mouths shut for most of their lives or spend money on anti-aging products for a long time."

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