NYU Langone Medical Center

CALORIE-RESTRICTING DIETS SLOW AGING, STUDY FINDS

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The adage ‘you are what you eat’ has been around for years. Now, important new research provides another reason to be careful with your calories.

Neuroscientists at NYU Langone Medical Center have shown that calorie-reduced diets stop the normal rise and fall in activity levels of close to 900 different genes linked to aging and memory formation in the brain.

In a presentation prepared for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 17, researchers say their experimental results, conducted in female mice, suggest how diets with fewer calories derived from carbohydrates likely deter some aspects of aging and chronic diseases in mammals, including humans.

“Our study shows how calorie restriction practically arrests gene expression levels involved in the aging phenotype — how some genes determine the behavior of mice, people, and other mammals as they get old,” says senior study investigator and NYU Langone neuroscientist, Stephen D. Ginsberg, PhD. Ginsberg cautions that the study does not mean calorie restriction is the “fountain of youth,” but that it does “add evidence for the role of diet in delaying the effects of aging and age-related disease.”

While restrictive dietary regimens have been well-known for decades to prolong the lives of rodents and other mammals, their effects in humans have not been well understood. Benefits of these diets have been touted to include reduced risk of human heart disease, hypertension, and stroke, Ginsberg notes, but the widespread genetic impact on the memory and learning regions of aging brains has not before been shown. Previous studies, he notes, have only assessed the dietary impact on one or two genes at a time, but his analysis encompassed more than 10,000 genes.

Ginsberg, an associate professor at NYU Langone and its affiliated Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, says the research “widens the door to further study into calorie restriction and anti-aging genetics.”

For the study, female mice, which like people are more prone to dementia than males, were fed food pellets that had 30 percent fewer calories than those fed to other mice. Tissue analyses of the hippocampal region, an area of the brain affected earliest in Alzheimer’s disease, were performed on mice in middle and late adulthood to assess any difference in gene expression over time.

Gastric banding led to improvements in HDL, particle size after 5 years.

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Bariatric surgery using gastric banding did not improve LDL cholesterol or LDL particle number or size, despite significant weight loss among patients who underwent the procedure. Results suggest, however, a beneficial HDL remodeling process based on a significant increase in HDL cholesterol and HDL particle size.

Researchers from the New York University Langone Medical Center said the HDL remodeling process persisted up to 5 years after gastric banding.

“Knowing that some studies suggest early improvements in lipids after bariatric surgery, there is a paucity of data regarding changes in the lipoprotein abnormalities characteristic of the dyslipidemia of obesity. What we sought to do was to determine both initial and long-term effects of gastric banding surgery on lipids, with attention to LDL and HDL characteristics,” researcherAmita Singh, MD, from NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, said during a presentation here.

Patients with a BMI of 30 to 40 (n=50) underwent laparoscopic gastric banding. Physical exams and blood samples for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy were performed at baseline and at annual follow-up, which lasted 5 years.

At 1 and 5 years, researchers observed significant increases in HDL cholesterol (P<.001). After 5 years, mean HDL size was significantly increased (9.1 nm at baseline vs. 9.24 nm at 5 years; P<.002), and there was a trend toward increased HDL particle number (33.49 nm/L at baseline vs. 36.75 nm/L; P=.064). Conversely, early reductions in LDL particle number and size were nonsignificant after 5 years.

Metabolic syndrome and percent BMI loss had no effect on changes in particle number or size for both LDL and HDL. However, LDL particle number and LDL cholesterol were significantly correlated at 5 years (P<.001), although HDL cholesterol and HDL particle number were not, the researchers wrote. – by Samantha Costa

  • This study was interesting in the fact that we didn’t see a lot of the changes we expected. Acute weight loss lowers your cholesterol, but losing weight doesn’t lower your cholesterol, and it’s often just dietary changes. It’s interesting to see that, but it’s also limited.
  • Donna M. Polk, MD, MPH
  • Physician at Hartford Hospital (Connecticut)

 

  • Source: Endocrine Today.