Wanna Delay Aging? Get Castrated, Scientists Say
upstart writes:
Wanna Delay Aging? Get Castrated, Scientists Say:
According to new research, there may be a surprisingly effective way for men to increase their lifespans - but it requires a pretty severe alteration to the physical body that may not appeal to everybody.
[...] "Both farmers and scientists have known for some time that castrated male sheep live on average much longer than their intact counterparts; however, this is the first time anyone has looked at DNA to see if it also ages slower," said Victoria Sugrue, a researcher at the University of Otago and lead author of a paper about the research published in the journal eLife, in a statement.
[...] "We developed a way to measure biological age in a broad range of mammals - we have looked at over 200 species so far and discovered surprising commonality in which animals age," said study co-author Steve Horvath, professor from the University of California in Los Angeles, in the statement. "But the sheep study was unique in that it specifically isolated the effects of male hormones on aging."
[...] "We found that males and females have very different patterns of DNA aging in sheep; and that despite being male, the castrates [wethers] had very feminine characteristics at specific DNA sites," said Tim Hore, research team co-leader and lecturer at Otago, in the statement.
[...] "Interestingly, those sites most affected by castration also bind to receptors of male hormones in humans at a much greater rate than we would expect by chance," Hore said. "This provides a clear link between castration, male hormones and sex-specific differences in DNA aging."
Journal Reference:
Victoria J Sugrue, Joseph Alan Zoller, Pritika Narayan, et al. Castration delays epigenetic aging and feminizes DNA methylation at androgen-regulated loci, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.64932)
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