What the Oldest Lab Rodents Are Teaching Humans About Staying Young

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What the Oldest Lab Rodents Are Teaching Humans About Staying Young

By Cara Giaimo | Bloomberg Businessweek | December 21, 2023 

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Each day technicians at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, check on special groups of mice in their care. The mice are all more than 600 days old, roughly 60 in human years; some are much older. A few may need help reaching their water dispensers, but many are how humans hope to be as we age: “curious, energetic, unbelievably active,” says Nadia Rosenthal, the lab’s scientific director. “It takes them a little longer to run from one side of the cage to the other,” but often “that’s the only difference.”  In 2003, a genetically engineered dwarf mouse in a lab lived to 4 years, 11 months and 21 days—roughly 180 in human years—winning the Methuselah Mouse Prize, an award once given to long-lived mice, and setting a lab mouse life span record that still hasn’t been broken.

Labs from North Dakota to Mumbai, select rodents grow old under heavy scrutiny. Tucked away from the world to avoid pathogens and other confounding variables, sleeping in piles and doing flexed-arm hangs, and soldiering on as their cage mates die, they’re helping to illuminate certain mysteries of aging and test the efficacy of life-extension methods that may eventually be used for humans.

In 1935 a group of researchers led by nutritionist and gerontologist Clive McCay made a breakthrough. They put a group of rats on a nutritious but calorie-restricted diet and found that they lived about 33% longer than average. This was the first demonstration “that aging could be slowed down.”  It also established “a fundamental prerequisite for valid longevity studies”—that animals “must be given the opportunity to achieve old age.”

Over the years, the experimentation has surfaced several promising life-span-increasing interventions. The most successful, mousewise, is a combination of the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin and the glucose regulator acarbose, which allowed mice in the ITP to live an average of 29% longer. Other stakeholders are now investigating these and other successful drugs further, in mice, different study animals or occasionally themselves.

Since these discoveries, researchers have been looking into the extent of the dwarf mouse’s special powers. “If we look for mechanisms related to health, these animals are probably teaching us many things.”  They’ve found the little guys are better than normal mice at handling oxidative stress, a buildup of reactive molecules that can damage tissues. They have “exquisitely good regulation of blood sugar.”  Put on high-fat diets, they avoid fatty liver disease, and when mice bred to develop Alzheimer’s-like conditions are crossed with dwarf mice, their descendants are slower to experience the hallmarks of that disease.

“There’s something about their metabolism physiology that helps to slow or prevent some of these age-related diseases.” “They not only live longer, but they live healthier.” Humans with similar genetic growth hormone deficiencies don’t seem to have unusually long life spans. So researchers focus on some of these other effects, trying to trace their relation to health and life.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Labs from North Dakota to Mumbai, select rodents grow old under heavy scrutiny. Tucked away from the world to avoid pathogens and other confounding variables, sleeping in piles and doing flexed-arm hangs, and soldiering on as their cage mates die, they’re helping to illuminate certain mysteries of aging and test the efficacy of life-extension methods that may eventually be used for humans.
2. Over the years, the experimentation has surfaced several promising life-span-increasing interventions. The most successful, mousewise, is a combination of the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin and the glucose regulator acarbose, which allowed mice to live an average of 29% longer.
3. Humans with similar genetic growth hormone deficiencies don’t seem to have unusually long life spans. So researchers focus on some of these other effects, trying to trace their relation to health and life.

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Topics: Longevity, Death, Life