The recipe for prolonging life: become a dwarf!
Small but healthy
Dwarf people do not suffer from cancer and diabetes
Pyotr Smirnov, Newspaper.
In a small population of dwarfs living on the slopes of the Andes, the concepts of "cancer" and "diabetes" are simply absent, scientists have found out. This means that hypotheses put forward from animal observation that starvation and suppression of growth hormone can get rid of "aging diseases" have been confirmed for the first time in humans.
If anyone living today can claim the proud name of the rulers of the mountains, it is a small population of dwarfs living on the slopes of the Andes. At the same time, the comparison is based not only on growth: like the characters of the German epic, in their hands, or rather blood, they hold the secret of longevity. However, to reveal it, the authors of the publication in Science Translational Medicine (Jaime Guevara-Aguirre et al., Growth Hormone Receptor Deficiency Is Associated with a Major Reduction in Pro-Aging Signaling, Cancer, and Diabetes in Humans) did not need to go on a journey through the dungeons.
Walter Longo from the University of Southern California and his colleagues have been observing the life of a remote population in Ecuador for 22 years. For all the time, none of the 100 dwarfs got cancer or diabetes. And this is despite the fact that out of 1,600 of their neighbors, 5% developed diabetes, and another 17% had some form of malignant tumors. And all "thanks" to the normal work of growth hormone.
These features do not concern all dwarfs at all. Longo's wards suffer from Laron syndrome, a rare hereditary disease described in the middle of the century among Arabs and Jews. The peculiarity of this hereditary disease is a defect in the growth hormone receptor on all cells of the body. The result is a flat nose, obesity of the body, underdevelopment of the lower jaw, a small penis and small growth. As for the internal organs, they function quite normally, and judging by Longo's data, even better than in completely healthy people.
In a picture from an article in the New York Times (Ecuadorean Villagers May Hold Secret to Longevity) –
a small but remote 67-year-old macho man with a five-year-old daughter and sons of seven and ten years old.
They didn't inherit Laron's syndrome from Dad – VM.
The inferiority of the growth hormone receptor in patients with Laron syndrome leads to a violation of the synthesis of insulin-like growth factor. It is its increased concentration that leads to "diseases of aging" – cancer, diabetes, circulatory disorders.
It can be reduced genetically – then you can achieve a life extension of 40 percent, which has already been shown in mice. There are other methods: moderate fasting or taking resveratrol has a similar effect. And for opponents of asceticism, there are already medications that are used in the treatment of acromegaly, tumors and chronic inflammatory diseases.
Of course, we cannot do without side effects here, but when it comes to longevity (and active longevity, without diseases and weakness), we are ready to make sacrifices. Especially on human sacrifices: as scientists have shown, the blood serum of Ecuadorian dwarfs has a "healing" effect even on foreign cells.
Firstly, it protects DNA from damage, and it is precisely the defects of the genome formed during cell division that are the main cause of aging of the body. Secondly, if the genetic material of the cell is already irreversibly disrupted, then the "serum of life" launches a self-destruction program, which is so lacking in tumors. These phenomena were again associated with the signaling cascades of growth hormone, insulin and insulin-like growth factor.
However, as usual in nature, this unique feature was compensated – the average life expectancy of dwarfs in the end did not differ from the population as a whole. They have to pay for their freedom from cancer and diabetes with an increased frequency of accidents and death from bad habits, primarily from alcoholism.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
18.02.2011