Is it possible to prolong the life of neurons?

The aging of neurons depends on the aging of the body

Kirill Stasevich, Compulenta

One of the signs of approaching old age is the weakening of the brain. Nerve cells do not recover (if you do not take into account the weak neurogenesis, which still exists in some areas of the brain), and therefore one day the brain simply, as they say, begins to lack personnel. However, as it turned out, the lifetime of neurons depends on the life span of the organism itself: the more it is prone to longevity, the more its nerve cells will stretch.

Lorenzo Magrassi from the University of Pavia and colleagues from the University of Turin (both in Italy) used fluorescent protein to modify the precursors of nerve cells in mouse embryos. The lifetime of mice was 18 months, but even before the birth of the progenitor cell, neurons were transplanted into embryos of rats that lived twice as long. Progenitor cells differentiated into neurons of different types, and scientists observed one of them, called Purkinje cells.

Purkinje neurons in the cerebral cortex (photo by Thomas Deerinck)

It turned out that in aged mice, the number of Purkinje cells decreased by almost half. In rats, by this time, all the cells were intact.

When the rats reached old age three years later, the scientists checked how the animals were doing with the transplanted neurons. The cells aged in the same way as the neighboring rats' own neurons, but their lifespan was comparable to the lifespan of the animals themselves. That is, in aging, the transplanted neurons did not overtake their new hosts and did not die prematurely.

At the same time, as the researchers write in the journal PNAS (Lifespan of neurons is uncoupled from organizational lifespan), externally these neurons did not change in any way, that is, they looked as if they belonged to a mouse, not a rat brain.

It follows from this that the lifetime of nerve cells is not genetically predetermined and to a very large extent depends on the environment. Neurons don't have their own biological clock that tells them it's time to die–the whole body serves them as such a clock. By influencing the environment of nerve cells, you can prolong their life without fear of disrupting their work. And it's not a sin for us to take advantage of this opportunity, although it remains to be seen how things are with the biological clock in human neurons.

Prepared based on the materials of Medical Xpress: No genetic clock for neuron longevity.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.02.2013