Rats give pointer to elixir of youth

February 20, 2002

Tim Radford

Guardian

Tuesday February 19, 2002

A troupe of elderly dancing rats has opened up the prospect of rejuvenating

ageing humans, scientists revealed yesterday.

Although dietary supplements sold in health food shops might not do much yet

for humans, they put old rodents back on the road again. Bruce Ames, a cell

biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, reports in the

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that he fed elderly

rats two chemicals, acetyl-L-carintine and the anti-oxidant alpha-lipoic

acid. Both are normally found in mammal cells, and both are sold in US

health shops. Then he tested the animals for memory and stamina.

" With these two supplements together, these old rats got up and did the

macarena, " he said. " The brain looks better, they are full of energy:

everything we looked at looks more like a young animal. "

His colleague Tony Hagen, of Oregon State University, said: " We also see a

reversal in loss of memory. This is a dual track improvement that is

significant and unique. This is really starting to explode and move out of

the realm of basic research into people. "

The University of California has patented the combination. The two

scientists have formed a company, Juvenon, to license the patent from the

university. They do not claim to have found an elixir of youth. But the hope

is that there might be ways of delaying the onset of age related problems.

Dr Ames and his colleague think that the combination " tunes up " the tiny

power packs in the cells known as mitochondria. They had been intrigued by

research in 1999 that showed that old rats responded to one of the

compounds. They eventually tried a combination approach to simultaneously

restore activity and combat the stresses of chemical damage to cells.

They fed both very young and old rats one compound in their water, the other

in their food. After one month, the older rats had responded.

" We significantly reversed the decline in overall activity typical of aged

rats to what you see in a middle aged to young adult rat seven to 10 months

of age, " Dr Hagen said. " This is the equivalent of making a 75- to

80-year-old person act middle aged. We have only shown short term effects

but the results give us the rationale for looking at these things long

term. "

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