Scientists Find Natural Product That Slows Aging

New research showed that treatment of aged mice with the natural product Fisetin has significant positive effects on health and lifespan.

Fisetin can be found in many fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries. Image credit: Forest & Kim Starr/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Previous research showed it was possible to reduce the burden of damaged cells, termed senescent cells, and extend lifespan and improve health, even when treatment was initiated late in life.

As people age, they accumulate damaged cells. When the cells get to a certain level of damage they go through an aging process of their own, called cellular senescence. The cells also release inflammatory factors that tell the immune system to clear those damaged cells.

A younger person's immune system is healthy and is able to clear the damaged cells. But as people age, they aren't cleared as effectively. Thus they begin to accumulate, cause low level inflammation and release enzymes that can degrade the tissue.

Researchers from Department of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota found a natural product, called Fisetin, a plant polyphenol from the flavonoid group, reduces the level of these damaged cells in the body. They found this by treating mice towards the end of life with this compound and see improvement in health and lifespan.

These results suggest that we can extend the period of health, termed healthspan, even towards the end of life. But there are still many questions to address, including the right dosage, for example.

One question they can now answer, however, is why haven't they done this before? There were always key limitations when it came to figuring out how a drug will act on different tissues, different cells in an aging body. Researchers didn't have a way to identify if a treatment was actually attacking the particular cells that are senescent, until now.

The team used mass cytometry, or CyTOF, technology and applied it for the first time in aging research, which is unique to the University of Minnesota. (Tasnim News Agency)

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