- As
we get older, our brain naturally ages, and the ability to perform certain
tasks like memory and learning declines.
- Previous
research shows that living a healthy lifestyle that includes eating right
can help slow brain aging.
- Researchers
from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have found that restricting
the amount of food a person eats may also help protect the brain from
aging.
- The
research identified a specific gene that is enhanced through calorie
restriction, aiding processes necessary for healthy brain aging.
As we get older, our
body — including our brain — naturally begins to age. Certain tasks that the
brain performs, such as memory and learning,
begin to decline.
According to the National Institute on Aging,
previous research shows that living a healthy lifestyle that includes physical
activity, stress management, fostering social connections, and eating right,
can help slow brain aging.
Now researchers from the
Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, CA, have found that restricting
the amount of food a person eats may also help protect the brain from aging,
via models of both fruit flies and human cells.
The research — recently
published in the journal Nature Communications —
identified a specific gene that is enhanced through calorie restriction, aiding
processes necessary for healthy brain aging.
How calorie
restriction affects brain aging
According to Dr. Lisa Ellerby, professor at the Buck
Institute for Research on Aging, adjunct professor of gerontology at the USC
Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and co-senior author of this study, the
team decided to study the impact of calorie restriction on brain aging because
dietary restriction is a significant intervention for the aging process and the
brain is a particularly vulnerable organ during aging.
“Therefore, understanding factors that are modulated
by dietary restriction and are protective in the brain is a significant
research direction in the field,” Dr. Ellerby told Medical News Today. “Plus,
many people are doing various forms of caloric restriction, in
particular, intermittent fasting. This was a
beginning step in understanding how those efforts might impact brain aging.”
For example, a review of
research published in February 2021 reported that dietary restriction may help
protect the brain against neuroinflammation
and neurodegeneration.
“Age-related disease is
arguably the greatest biomedical challenge in the 21st century,” Dr. Ellerby
said.
“Age
is the largest risk factor for developing diseases of the brain. Postponing or
decreasing the rate of aging could retard multiple age-related diseases and
thus neurological diseases. In terms of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, there are no available treatments
to actually treat the diseases, so it’s important that we understand ways to
prevent or slow the progression of neurodegenerative diseases.”– Dr. Lisa
Ellerby
Identifying
the gene affected by calorie restriction
For this study, Dr.
Ellerby and her team used both fruit fly models and human cells to examine how
calorie restriction might affect how the brain ages.
The team used a fruit
fly model of 160 different fly strains with different genetic backgrounds.
Flies were either raised on a normal diet or a diet that was only 10% of its
normal nutrition.
From there, researchers
identified five genes that had specific variants that significantly impacted
longevity under dietary restriction.
One of those is the
“mustard” gene in fruit flies that correlates to the oxidation resistance 1 (OXR1) gene in humans and rodents.
Previous research shows
that a depletion of OXR1 gene
products is a shared feature of neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s
disease and diabetic retinopathy, while studies in mice
show that overexpression of OXR1 may be protective against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The
role of protein ‘recycling’ in aging
Additionally, scientists
found the OXR1 gene affects the retromer, which sorts proteins and decides
which can be reused by the body and which cannot.
“Recycling is important
in our daily life,” Dr. Ellerby explained. “A cell does a similar process — it
needs to recycle damaged components. The retromer is a cellular complex known
to recycle proteins and lipids.”
“It was surprising [that] a protein known as OXR1
[expressed by the OXR1 gene]
is involved in the retromer function,” she continued. “In past research, this
protein was thought to be involved in responding to oxidative stress or
detoxification.”
Dr. Ellerby said she and
her colleagues believe these findings may be used in the future to help
identify potential therapeutic targets to potentially slow aging and
age-related neurodegenerative diseases.
“Finding factors that
make the brain resilient or prevent the aging process will be important to
slowing aging,” she continued. “It is possible that simple changes in our diet
can increase the levels of OXR1 in the brain and this would be protective.”
“We boosted OXR1 in the
flies via genetic manipulation,” Dr. Ellerby added. “We are planning to
identify small molecules that increase the expression of OXR1 to design a
therapeutic for the aging brain.”
Further
studies should assess link between diet and brain aging
MNT also spoke with Dr. Clifford Segil, a
neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, about
this study.
After reading this
research, Dr. Segil commented that it remains challenging to elucidate which
findings can translate into providing neurologists with something to advise
their patients to do to promote healthy eating.
“Dietary restriction was noted to have clear
mechanisms of action with enhanced metabolism and fat burning with age and
dietary restriction in the brain is something that should be pursued in more
complicated organisms than fruit flies and yeast, though the research has to
start in these simple organisms,” he explained.
“Dietary and caloric
restriction, I believe, are worthy of further studies to determine if our
excessive cultural caloric intake provides us with more harm than benefits. A
healthy diet decreases the [chances] of having a stroke or cerebrovascular disease also,” added Dr. Segil.
He further pointed out
that, with the current trend of injectable medications being used on a
widespread basis for weight loss, large numbers of people are
going to be effectively diet-restricted.
“This cohort may be an
excellent group to use as data in future research to determine what dietary
restriction can do to help avoid neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or
Parkinson’s disease,” he added.
“I would like a bench
[of] scientists to take the results from this study and use it in more
complicated organisms than fruit flies and yeasts. I would like to see this
group of scientists collaborate with another group of scientists who could use
human patients using injectable weight loss medications — GLP-1 agents — to design a study with
human clinical data,” said Dr. Segil.
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