05 Feb Live Longer…Don’t Reproduce?
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
John Tower, PhD
Professor, Molecular and Computational Biology Program
Department of Biological Sciences
USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2910
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: One of the main causes of aging is thought to be the trade-off between reproduction and life span – in other words, the body uses its resources for mating and producing offspring instead of repairing and maintaining its tissues and organs. What exactly these resources are and how this works is not yet known.
The drug mifepristone inhibits reproduction in human females. Mifepristone antagonizes (inhibits) the activity of the female hormone progesterone, which is required for normal reproduction. We found that mifepristone could also inhibit reproduction in the laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and could increase the life span of mated female flies by up to +68%. Drosophila are not thought to contain progesterone, but the results suggest that some similar steroid hormone may be functioning in Drosophila to regulate the trade-off between reproduction and life span. We found that many of the genes that were altered by mifepristone in the fly are genes that also exist in humans; these genes are therefore promising targets for future interventions in aging.
One exciting possibility suggested by our results is that mifepristone might be able to favor the life span of human females. This could be tested using mice and/or in human clinical trials.
Citation:
Landis GN1, Salomon MP1, Keroles D1, Brookes N1, Sekimura T1, Tower J1.
Aging (Albany NY). 2015 Jan 15. [Epub ahead of print]
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:, & John Tower, PhD (2015). Live Longer…Don’t Reproduce? MedicalResearch.com
Last Updated on February 17, 2015 by Marie Benz MD FAAD