A scientific team from the University of Oviedo, led by Spanish biochemists Carlos López Otín and Pedro Moral Quirós, has found that maintaining healthy intestinal flora or microbiota improves the health and life expectancy of mice with accelerated aging.
The importance of the microbiota
The gut microbiome is emerging as a key regulator in various pathways within our body. Thus, bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that live in our intestines have a great role not only in the appearance of diseases such as diabetes and obesity, but also in something as important as life expectancy.
Dysregulation of the gut microbiomes has been associated with major conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, nonalcoholic fatty acid liver disease, and cancer, but its precise role in aging has not been elucidated until now .
In their study, the experts discovered that two different mouse models of Progeria (or Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome that causes accelerated aging) , were characterized by intestinal dysbiosis – this balance of the gut microbiota – with alterations that included an increase in the abundance of bacteria such as Proteobacteria and Cyanobacteria , and a decrease in the abundance of Akkermansia muciniphila. Consistent with these findings, “we found that patients with human progeria also have intestinal dysbiosis and that long-lived humans (ie, centenarians) exhibit a substantial increase in Verrucomicrobia and a reduction in Proteobacteria.”
Transplantation of fecal microbiota from wild-type mice improved health and life expectancy in both accelerated aging mouse models, and transplantation with the verrucomicrobial Akkermansia muciniphila was sufficient to exert beneficial effects.
“ Our results demonstrate that correction of gut dysbiosis associated with accelerated aging is beneficial, suggesting a link between aging and the gut microbiota that provides a rationale for microbiome-based interventions against age-related diseases. ”, Clarify the authors.
Thus, this Spanish study shows that intestinal imbalance could be solved with a microbiota transplant and be considered as a future therapy for conditions related to aging.
What exactly is a fecal transplant?
Fecal transplantation is a medical procedure in which feces from a healthy donor are introduced into the intestine of a patient as a treatment for disease . The idea is that the donor’s stool contains a healthy mix of gut bacteria that can seed the gut of the patient, giving healthy results. While the procedure may seem very unappealing, it is not unhealthy. Stool is obtained from a donor or from a stool bank, where it is pre-screened for pathogens and processed for medical use.
Donor feces can be administered through a plastic tube inserted through the nose into the stomach or small intestine. Alternatively, the donor stool can be introduced into the colon through an enema or colonoscopy, or even orally via a capsule.
The work, funded by the DeAge project of the European Research Council, the Progeria Research Foundation, the Carlos III Health Institute, the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Caja de Ahorros de Asturias Banking Foundation, has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.
As always, more studies will be needed to confirm these effects in humans.
Reference: Healthspan and lifespan extension by fecal microbiota transplantation into progeroid mice. Clea Bárcena, Rafael Valdés-Mas, Pablo Mayoral, Cecilia Garabaya, Sylvère Durand, Francisco Rodríguez, María Teresa Fernández-García, Nuria Salazar, Alicja M. Nogacka, Nuria Garatachea, Noélie Bossut, Fanny Aprahamian, Alejandro Lucia, Guido Kroemer, José MP Freije, Pedro M. Quirós & Carlos López-Otín. Nature Medicine (Published July 22, 2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0504-5
