Late Life Rapamycin Treatment Reverses Diastolic Dysfunction in Mice

Inhibitors of mTOR such as rapamycin are increasingly well studied. This class of drug stimulates cellular stress responses, principally autophagy, and thus produces outcomes that are broadly similar to the long-term improvement of health resulting from calorie restriction, exercise, or other demonstrated means of upregulating autophagy. This results in benefits to health, such as those noted in today's open access paper. It is one thing to demonstrate that a drug improves measures of autophagy known to decline with age, and note that many of the interventions shown to modestly slow aging in laboratory species are characterized by improved autophagy. It is quite another to determine the links between low-level change in cell biochemistry and high level tissue properties. Cellular metabolism is enormously complex, and comparatively little headway has been made towards building broad bridges between (a) specific causative mechanisms of aging, (b) downstream issues with cellular biochemistry such as faltering autophagy, and (c) mechanical, structural, and other properties of tissue and organ function. It remains the case that knowing that a particular intervention works to improve health does not imply knowing how it works to improve health in detail. Late-life Rapamycin Treatment Enhances Cardiomyocyte Relaxation Kinetics and Reduces Myocardial Stiffness Diastolic function is controlled by active relaxation of cardiomyocytes and passive stiffness of the m...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs