How to Stay Young for Longer: Accidental Drug Discovery Causes Longer Youth

Researchers may have accidentally discovered how to stay younger for longer-at least in worms. A new study reveals that worms administered an antidepressant have increased lifespans of 30 to 40 percent.

Living longer usually means a longer dotage. But what if you could extend your young adulthood years instead? Scientists have announced that they've achieved success in doing just that with roundworms.

"We don't want people to get the impression that they can take the drug we used in our study to extend their own teens and early twenties," said Michael Petrascheck, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We may have done this in worms, but there are millions of years of evolution between worms and humans."

In this latest study, the researchers administered an antidepressant called mianserin to Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm used frequently in research. In 2007, the researchers found that the drug increases the lifespan of roundworms by 30 to 40 percent.

Now, researchers are investigating why it increases their lifespan. The scientists looked at the activity of genes as the worms aged. They found that there were dramatic changes in gene expression. However, the changes occurred in a way that came as a surprise; groups of genes that together play a role in the same function were found to change expression in opposing directions. This newly discovered process was called "transcriptional drift.

"Transcriptional drift can be used as a new metric for measuring age-associated changes that start in young adulthood," said Sunitha Rangaraju, one of the researchers. "Until now we have been dependent on measuring death rates, which are too low in young adults to provide much data. Having a new tool to study aging could help us make new discoveries, for example to treat genetic predispositions where aging starts earlier, such as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome."

The findings are published in the journal eLife.

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