The researchers tested common treatments for aging, including intermittent fasting which reduces calorie consumption, targeting a central node of cell metabolism , and interfering with the release of growth hormone.
The study, which was conducted by researchers from DZNE, Helmholtz Munich, and the German Center for Diabetes has been published in the journal“We chose three regulators for our interventions that many experts believe to slow down aging,” explains Prof. Dr. Martin Hrabě de Angelis, head of the Institute of Experimental Genetics and director of the German Mouse Clinic at Helmholtz Munich, who also drove the project with his team.
“It is often assumed that if they just live longer, they will also age more slowly. But the problem is that mice, like many other organisms, do not die from general old age, but from very specific diseases,” says Ehninger. For example, up to 90 percent of mice die from tumors that form in their bodies at an advanced age.
“You can think of it as a complete health status survey,” says Martin Hrabě de Angelis: “The health check results in a compendium of hundreds of factors covering many areas of physiology” — an exact description of the state of the animal at the moment of examination.