Study: Anti-Aging Supplements
The lowest price on alpha-lipoic acid I've found
is at VitaminShoppe.com. Evidence has suggested
alpha-lipoic acid could be a potent anti-aging
supplement. This new study adds to that evidence.
I have not shopped around for acetyl-L-carnitine,
which is the second supplement used in this study.
http://IanGoddard.net
From the University of California, at Berkeley
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/02/19_diet.html
Dietary supplements make old rats youthful, may help rejuvenate
aging humans, according to UC Berkeley study
19 February 2002
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations
Berkeley - Two dietary supplements straight off the health food
store shelf put the spark back into aging rats, and might do the
same for aging baby boomers, according to a study at the
University of California, Berkeley, and Children's Hospital
Oakland Research Institute.
A team of researchers led by Bruce N. Ames, professor of molecular
and cell biology at UC Berkeley, fed older rats two chemicals
normally found in the body's cells and available as dietary
supplements: acetyl-L-carnitine and an antioxidant, alpha-lipoic
acid.
In three articles in the February 19 issue of Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Ames and his colleagues report the
surprising results. Not only did the older rats do better on
memory tests, they had more pep, and the energy-producing
organelles in their cells worked better.
"With the two supplements together, these old rats got up and did
the Macarena," said Ames, also a researcher at Children's Hospital
Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). "The brain looks better, they
are full of energy - everything we looked at looks more like a
young animal."
"The animals seem to have much more vigor and are much more active
than animals not on this diet, signaling massive improvement to
these animals' health and well-being," said former UC Berkeley
post-doctoral fellow Tory M. Hagen, now an assistant professor
at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University,
Corvallis. "And we also see a reversal in loss of memory. That is
a dual-track improvement that is significant and unique. This is
really starting to explode and move out of the realm of basic
research into people."
Based on the group's earlier studies, the University of California
patented use of the combination of the two supplements to
rejuvenate cells. Ames, through the Bruce and Giovanna Ames
Foundation, and Hagen founded a company in 1999 called Juvenon to
license the patent from the university. Juvenon currently is
engaged in human clinical trials of the combination.
One of the three PNAS articles probes the reasons behind this
rejuvenation, concluding that the two chemicals "tune up" the
energy-producing organelles that power all cells, the
mitochondria. Both chemicals are normally used in mitochondria.
Ames calls mitochondria the "weak link in aging." Evidence has
been piling up, he said, that deterioration of mitochondria is
an important cause of aging. A significant cause of this
deterioration, he believes, is the accumulation of destructive
free radicals - byproducts of normal metabolism - that disable
enzymes and other chemicals.
The combination therapy targets mitochondria to get rid of
destructive radicals and to boost the activity of a damaged
enzyme, carnitine acetyltransferase, that plays a key role in
burning fuel in mitochondria. The researchers hoped that the
anti-oxidant alpha-lipoic acid would do the former, and that
flooding the cell with acetyl-L-carnitine, one of two proteins
that the enzyme acts on, would achieve the latter.
Experiments showed that this regimen worked. Associate researcher
Jiankang Liu of CHORI, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow David W.
Killilea and Ames demonstrated that the enzyme carnitine
acetyltransferase is less active in old rats than in young rats,
and that it binds less tightly to acetyl-L-carnitine in older
rats.
Supplementation with acetyl-L-carnitine or a combination of
acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid restored the enzyme's
activity nearly to that found in young rats and substantially
restored binding to acetyl-L-carnitine.
"The acetyl-L-carnitine is protecting the protein and the higher
levels are enabling the protein to work, while alpha-lipoic acid
knocks down oxygen radicals," Ames said. "Each chemical solves a
different problem - the two together are better than either one
alone."
Ames and Hagen have long had an interest in mitochondria as they
relate to aging, and they were intrigued by a 1999 Italian study
that showed acetyl-L-carnitine, when fed to old rats, improved
mitochondrial activity.
The two thought this might be a way to reverse the effects of
aging on mitochondria, and in various trials found it to work to
some degree. Free radicals were still damaging the cell, however,
so they decided to pair it with one of the few antioxidants that
gets into mitochondria, alpha-lipoic acid. Lipoic acid is produced
by mitochondria and boosts levels of other antioxidants.
In the second of the PNAS studies, Hagen, Ames and colleagues
compared 2- to 4-month-old rats to 24- to 28-month-old rats, all
fed acetyl-L-carnitine in their water and alpha-lipoic acid in
their chow.
After as much as a month on the supplements, the old and lethargic
rats became more peppy, Ames said.
"We significantly reversed the decline in overall activity typical
of aged rats to what you see in a middle-aged to young adult rat 7
to 10 months of age," Hagen said. "This is equivalent to making a
75- to 80-year-old person act middle-aged. We've only shown
short-term effects, but the results give us the rationale for
looking at these things long term."
They found also that the combination of lipoic acid and acetyl-
carnitine improved mitochondrial activity and thus cellular
metabolism, and increased levels of various chemicals known to
decline with age, including ascorbic acid, an antioxidant.
In a third study, Liu, Hagen, Ames and colleagues fed old rats a
similar diet of the two supplements and looked at memory function
as measured by the Morris water maze test and a peak procedure for
assessing temporal or time-based memory developed by Seth Roberts,
professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. They found that
supplementation improved both spatial and temporal memory, and
reduced the amount of oxidative damage to RNA in the brain's
hippocampus, an area important in memory. In electron microscope
pictures of cells from the hippocampus, mitochondria showed less
structural decay in old rats that had a supplemented diet.
"We did two different tests for cognitive activity in rats, and in
both it made a big difference to feed them this mixture," Ames
said. "Memory degenerates with age, and this makes them better."
The analysis of nucleic acid damage in the brain was performed
with post-doctoral researcher Elizabeth Head and Carl W. Cotman,
professor of neurobiology and behavior, at the Institute for Brain
Aging and Dementia at UC Irvine. UC Berkeley psychology graduate
student Afshin M. Gharib worked with Liu to conduct the peak
performance tests.
"In aging, you're oxidizing the proteins in mitochondria and they
lose activity," Ames explained. "If some of that lost activity is
due to binding for substrate or coenzyme - like binding of acetyl-
L-carnitine by carnitine acetyltransferase - and you can raise
the level of those, then you can reverse some of the loss.
"We showed, in fact, that that is what's happening with acetyl-L-
carnitine. Aldehydes from lipid oxidation are glomming onto that
protein, and that is what appears to cause the reduction in
binding activity. But if you raise the level of acetyl-L-
carnitine, now it works."
Hagen added, "With aging, we see so many different things that
are occurring to mitochondria that then lead to consequences in
the cell. If you tune up mitochondria you may have a means of at
least delaying the onset of a number of age-related problems
that we encounter, or we can in some ways, hopefully, reverse
what has already taken place."
The work was supported by grants from the Ellison Foundation, the
National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health,
the Wheeler Fund of the Dean of Biology at UC Berkeley, the Bruce
and Giovanna Ames Foundation and the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences Center at UC Berkeley.
A previous UC Berkeley alpha-lipoic acid study:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/mutagen/FASEB99.pdf
http://IanGoddard.net
"To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals." Benjamin Franklin
http://www.ultraHIQ.net/Ubiquity/Winter02/CR.html
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