Antibodies against the effects of menopause
Doctors have learned how to protect women from obesity at the onset of menopause
An international team of scientists has discovered an antibody that suppresses both the main negative effects of menopause – obesity and osteoporosis, according to an article published in the journal Nature (Liu et al., Blocking FSH induces thermogenic adipose tissue and reduces body fat).
It is believed that most animals retain the ability to reproduce throughout their adult life. Infertile elderly individuals do not benefit the population, which is why the life expectancy of most mammals is limited by the terms of their fertility. There are exceptions to this rule – among such mammals are humans and killer whales.
In turn, the long life after menopause in women is explained by the so-called grandmother's hypothesis. According to this theory, older women stop reproducing for evolutionary reasons – by helping their daughters to raise and raise children, the grandmother thereby increases the chances of further transmission of their genes. Anthropologists have found evidence of this theory in populations of Africans stuck in the primitive communal system.
Clifford Rosen from the Hospital Research Center in Maine (USA) and his colleagues studied how the two main consequences of the onset of menopause for a woman's health develop – rapid weight gain and rapidly growing bone fragility.
Both problems, as scientists explain, are related to the fact that women's ovaries actually completely stop producing estrogen and a number of other hormones that regulate the vital activity of the body at the cellular and tissue level.
Many of these changes associated with the onset of menopause occur due to the fact that the body does not "understand" that the ovaries have stopped working, and tries to force them to produce estrogen by releasing another hormone – FSH. Its increased concentration in the body of women, according to researchers, is accompanied by the rapid development of osteoporosis and obesity.
Guided by this idea, scientists created a small antibody that attached to the molecules of this hormone and prevented them from connecting to receptors on the surface of cells in a woman's body. They tested the performance of this substance first on cultures of mouse fat cells, and then on female rodents who entered artificial menopause after scientists removed their ovaries.
As these experiments showed, the antibody really suppressed the effects of the onset of menopause – mice into whose body scientists injected small portions of this substance did not get fat or fattened significantly less when eating high-calorie food than their relatives from the control group, and at the same time they did not experience problems with bone fragility.
Interestingly, the introduction of this antibody into the body of mice with intact ovaries also led to a decrease in the fat layer. A similar effect was observed in experiments on males. The reasons for this remain unknown, however, scientists believe that this is due to the fact that blocking the hormone FSH makes rodents more mobile and causes their body to burn more energy in brown fat, rather than storing it in white fat cells.
All this, according to scientists, allows the use of such antibodies not only to suppress the side effects of the onset of menopause, but also to combat obesity, the epidemic of which is rapidly spreading around the world today.
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25.05.2017