19 Feb Some Aging Interventions May Have Opposite Effects in Men and Women

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:

Dr. John Tower

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?
Dr. Tower: Possible interventions in aging that are currently being studied include alterations to the diet and also drugs that target the p53 and TOR pathways.  Our results show that these manipulations sometimes have opposite effects on survival in males versus females.

In addition, our results show that the same “low-vitality” individuals in the population are susceptible to death caused by disease and to death caused by aging.  This is called the “Strehler-Mildvan” relationship, and these “low-vitality” individuals could be related to human frailty.

Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?

Dr. Tower: The results caution that dietary and p53/TOR interventions might sometimes have opposite effects in men versus women, and therefore aging interventions should be carefully designed depending on the patient’s sex.  The results also indicate that identifying the causes for “low-vitality” may allow aging interventions to be tailored to the individual.

Medical Research: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Dr. Tower: In the future it will be important to determine the molecular and genetic mechanisms that cause males and females to respond differently to aging interventions.  

Medical Research: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Dr. Tower: Overall the data provide support for the sexual antagonistic pleiotropy model for aging – where genes sometimes have opposing effects in males versus females.

Citation:

Jie Shen, Gary N. Landis, and John Tower. Multiple Metazoan Life-span Interventions Exhibit a Sex-specific Strehler–Mildvan Inverse Relationship Between Initial Mortality Rate and Age-dependent Mortality Rate Acceleration. Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, February 2016 DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glw005

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John Tower, PhD (2016). Some Aging Interventions May Have Opposite Effects in Men and Women 

Last Updated on February 19, 2016 by Marie Benz MD FAAD