Longevity Daily: 10th August, 2020

Everyday our team of researchers in Oxford are inundated with scientific, and medical research articles that have the potential to improve health, wellbeing, and longevity. In this blog we highlight a few of them that caught our attention today.

1. All longevity researchers are looking for the secrets to increase healthspan, and lifespan. One way to find these secrets is to study exceptionally long lived people like supercentenarians (those aged ≥110 years), and compare their physiology with people with normal lifespans.
   • Researchers in Japan have done just that, they compared the disease-related biomarkers, and survival to the highest ages using a unique dataset of 1,427 oldest individuals from three long term follow-up studies, including 36 supercentenarians, 572 semi-supercentenarians (105-109 years), 288 centenarians (100-104 years), and 531 very old people (85-99 years).
   • They found that supercentenarian produced high levels of N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), and this may help them live longer. NT-proBNP is a hormone produced by your heart, and released in response to changes in pressure inside the heart.
   • They also found that low albumin levels in your blood is a key risk factor of mortality regardless of age. Albumin is the most common protein found in human blood, and is essential for many physiological processes including transporting hormones, fatty acids, and other compounds.
     
     
2. Keeping with our theme of discovering the secrets of longevity, researchers in China, Korea, and the US studied 1834 people aged 65 to 112 over the last decade to find out the importance of Vitamin D, and albumin concentrations in the blood.
   • Just like in the previous study from Japan (see above) these researchers also found that people with the low levels of blood albumin tended to die at younger age.
   • The researchers also found that low levels of Vitamin D (serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations [25(OH)D]) where associated with higher mortality.
     
     
3. One way to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of ageing is to search for genetic and environmental factors that influence longevity. This can lead to the identification of new potential drug targets.
   • In a study that is awaiting peer-review, researchers used multiple approaches including transcriptomics and mendelian randomisation to identify longevity-associated genes and proteins.
   • They identified multiple potential determinants of biological ageing that could be targeted to extend lifespan, including apolipoprotein-B containing particles and plasma haptoglobin levels.
     
     
4. Studies have shown that consumption of polyphenol-rich foods may decrease the risk of chronic conditions. Also, resveratrol, one of the well known anti-ageing drugs, is a polyphenol. Flavonoids represent a largest subgroup of polyphenols, but there are few studies addressing them.
   • In this study, Austrian researches have screened 180 different flavonoids and discovered that 4,4′-dimethoxychalcone (DMC) has anti-ageing properties across species due to promotion of cytoprotection (protection to cells against harmful agents) and autophagy (body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells).