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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : May 21, 2014 1:35 PM IST
Researchers have tried to explain the action of drug, Rapamycin, an antibiotic and immunosuppressant, to emulate the ability of dietary restriction in helping animals to live both longer and healthier. Researchers suggest that a combination of rapamycin and another drug to offset that increase in insulin resistance might provide the benefits of this medication without the unwanted side effect. Viviana Perez, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the OSU College of Science, said this could provide a way not only to increase lifespan but to address some age-related diseases and improve general health, asserting that they might find a way for people not only to live longer, but to live better and with a higher quality of life.
Age-related diseases include many of the degenerative diseases that affect billions of people around the world and are among the leading causes of death: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Laboratory mice that have received rapamycin have reduced the age-dependent decline in spontaneous activity, demonstrated more fitness, improved cognition and cardiovascular health, had less cancer and lived substantially longer than mice fed a normal diet. (Read:Quiz Is your skin ageing early?)
Called mTOR in mammals, for the term 'mammalian target of rapamycin,' this pathway has a critical evolutionary value - it helps an organism avoid too much cellular expansion and growth when energy supplies are insufficient. That helps explain why some form of the pathway has been conserved across such a multitude of species, from yeast to fish to humans. A big drawback to long-term use of rapamycin, however, is the increase in insulin resistance, observed in both humans and laboratory animals. The new research identified why that is happening. It found that both dietary restriction and rapamycin inhibited lipid synthesis, but only dietary restriction increased the oxidation of those lipids in order to produce energy. The new findings have been published in the Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences (Read: Gallery: 10 tips to age healthy)
Is taking antibiotics too often bad for your health?
The on-going war on antibiotics and the term 'antibiotic resistance' has scared everyone about the use, overuse and misuse of antibiotics. It's true that antibiotics are not needed every time you suffer from cold and cough, but the symptoms shouldn't be ignored to an extent that the infection becomes worse. Antibiotics are truly a boon to medical science because they have the ability to stop infections and are life-saving in many cases, but in some circumstances using them could cause more harm than good.
Antibiotics work by attacking the outer covering of a bacteria (that is the most common method), when you don't complete your course of antibiotics or eat them indiscriminately, bacteria that commonly cause infection mutate to produce an outer covering that is resistant to destruction by the antibiotic. This is dangerous because there are only so many antibiotics and if bacteria become resistant to all of them then we will be left with no method to treat bacterial infections. (Read more on antibiotics)
With inputs from ANI
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