Breaking News! Exciting Discovery of a 2,000-year-old Tibetan Root

Last month, a group of geneticists from UC Irvine published an article about Rhodiola root, confirming that feeding it to fruit flies makes them live 20% longer, and reporting a negative finding about how that might  work:  benefits of Rhodiola appear to be entirely separate from the response to hunger, the “CR Effect”. Why was the article featured in the prestigious journal, PLoS One, which is targeted at a broad audience of non-specialists?

Background

You might imagine that if living longer was as simple as eating an herb that has been known to traditional medicine since the time of the ancients, then this would have been validated by Science some time in the last hundred years, and health food store would be advertising it and every doctor recommending it.  Curiously, it hasn’t worked that way.  To study life extension in people takes too long, so a preliminary screening is done in mice.  To test a single candidate treatment costs about $100,000 and takes over two years.  Because herbal medicines can’t be patented, there is no company motivated to put up the money, and aging has never been a high priority for government grants, and the Federal budget for science has been dwindling.

(Stephen Spindler of UCLA has taken on the project of testing dozens of compounds to see if they extend the lives of mice, and has advocated that it’s just too slow and expensive, and we might gather information more quickly and cheaply by looking at how the compound effects the mouse’s gene expression.  This is expected to work because we know that gene expression changes in some characteristic ways in older mammals, and this is thought to be causally connected to aging.  Is anyone asking, “Why don’t we try to artificially engineer a youthful profile of gene expression?” Well, yes …but that’s a digression for another column.)

Only a handful of compounds are known that have been documented to extend life span in mice:  Deprenyl, metformin, melatonin, and rapamycin are three that come to mind.  They are all prescription drugs.  Melatonin is widely-available and cheap, useful for regularizing sleep and adjusting to change in time zones.  Metformin is a genuine anti-aging compound, in my opinion.  Its benefits are clearest for people who are overweight or diabetic; though I am neither, I take it myself, in subclinical doses.  Rapamycin is not ready for prime time.  It is a powerful immune suppressant and its long-term effects in humans have not yet been charted.  Deprenyl (= Selegeline,Eldepryl, Emsam, or Zelapar) has been around for decades and its side-effects are better charted.  It is a stimulant, a cousin of methamphetamine, and it will change the texture of your experience, in ways that you may like or may not.  A fourth compound is a Vietnamese herb called dinh lang, for which I’ve been able to locate just this one intriguing study from 1992.

Fruit flies are much easier to breed and quicker to produce results.  The tradeoff is that they are more distant from humans.  It’s a striking and quite general finding from the science of aging in the last 20 years that genetic mechanisms of aging tend to be similar, conserved over great stretches of evolutionary time, so that there is reason to hope that a genetic pathway that affects aging in flies will have a corresponding pathway in people.  There are more compounds known to extend life span in flies, and studying them for potential human therapies is one more promising, underfunded research project.  Stem Cell 100 is a product that claims to induce very long life span in flies in experiments also conducted at Irvine.  I’ve asked, but have been unable to find any peer-reviewed confirmation of this claim.)

Rhodiola

The herb Rhodiola has a venerable history

Rhodiola has a legendary history dating back thousands of years. In 77 A.D., the Greek physician Dioscorides documented the medical applications of the plant, which he then called rodia riza, in his classic medical text De Materia Medica. The Vikings depended on the herb to enhance their physical strength and endurance, while Chinese emperors sent expeditions to Siberia to bring back “the golden root” for medicinal preparations. The people of central Asia considered a tea brewed from Rhodiola rosea to be the most effective treatment for cold and flu. Mongolian physicians prescribed it for tuberculosis and cancer.   (Herb Wisdom)

The new paper starts with a quick summary of what is known about Rhodiola from modern experiments with animals.  Reading it, one might garner the impression that experiments have been haphazard.

The root extract of Rhodiola rosea, also known as the golden root, has been widely used in traditional and integrative medical practices in Europe and Asia, where it has been purported to mediate a variety of beneficial effects in humans, such as improved mood, improved physical and mental stamina, and enhanced protection against high altitude sickness [1]. The extract has also been reported to protect against tumor progression in mice, improve endurance in rats, improve blood glucose profiles in diabetic mice, and protect snail eggs against oxidative stress, heat, and heavy metals [2][5]. Our group has previously reported that R. rosea can extend the lifespan of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, protect flies and human cultured cells against oxidative stress, and decrease the production of reactive oxygen species in isolated fly mitochondria [6][8].

(Does the prose remind you of the Findings page from the back of Harpers magazine?)

Why we might raise an eyebrow

The authors of this paper raise the possibility that Rhodiola ought to be of interest for further investigation whether it might be a candidate for human life extension.  There are two reasons for optimism.

 First: Treatments that extend life span almost always increase stress resistance as well.  Animals that are pre-treated with caloric restriction prove to be much hardier when exposed to toxins.  Any compound that increases stress resistance becomes an interesting candidate for experimental investigation for life extension potential.

In one experiment, mice were exposed to a 100% lethal dose of gamma radiation..  But among those mice that were prepared with Rhodiola 30 minutes beforehand, 90% of them survived the same treatment.  The mechanism for such a dramatic protection is not completely understood.  The gamma radiation acts like the proverbial bull in the body’s china shop, randomly breaking apart the delicate and complex molecules on which life depends.  It’s unlikely that Rhodiola can do anything to stop that process.  However, the body has its own chemical machinery for repairing the damage, and it is likely that these are upregulated in response to the Rhodiola.  This makes sense at least on the surface, but it leaves you wondering:  if there is such a survival advantage to enhanced presence of these repair enzymes, why does the body wait until it sees Rhodiola in order to produce a little extra?

Second: Most of the known interventions that extend life span in animals have proven to be related to the biochemical pathways that the body uses to resist stress and stave off aging during periods of starvation.  CR mimetics are chemical or other means to harvest this potential without suffering hunger.  But the potential for using these is in danger of become saturated in humans because we already have several good ideas for mimetics.  Already 8 years ago, Aubrey de Grey was warning us that caloric restriction works much better in short-lived animals than in long-lived animals, and that the potential for extending human life by eating less (and mimetics) might be limited.

Bottom line

Rhodiola is interesting for all these reasons, and the fact that it is reported to increase energy, enhance concentration, and counter depression has tempted me to try it.  I’ll let you know.

13 thoughts on “Breaking News! Exciting Discovery of a 2,000-year-old Tibetan Root

  1. I learned today that fruit flies have no telomerase – an oddity. That rules out another candidate mechanism for how Rhoiola increases life span. Obviously it doesn’t activate the telomerase gene, because fruit flies have none.

    • Lack of information does not a conclusion make. Doesn’t the fact that fruit flies lack the telomerase gene simply suggest that Rhodiola’s effects on the telomerase gene are impossible to document using a study on fruit flies? Rhodiola studies on telomerase-equipped animals may yet yield positive activation results!

      • I have a personal communication from Bill Andrews this week that Rhodiola has been assayed in vitro for telomerase activity, with negative result. Bill has developed the most rapid and convenient telomerase assay now available, and his company, Sierra Sciences, has assayed hundreds of thousands of natural and artificial chemicals.

        Of course, activity in vivo is often different from in vitro, so I’ll take your point that we really don’t know.

  2. I personally have never tried deprenyl. I have one friend who takes deprenyl, and there are sites on the web where people talk about their experiences

    http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/63966-deprenyl-5mgs-per-day-experiences/
    http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27556
    http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/anabolic-steroids/has-anyone-tried-selegiline-l-deprenyl-519189.html

    I’m sure you can find others.

    Thanks for writing.

  3. I thought you might find this interesting –

    Indian Gooseberries (Emblica officinalis Gaertn.) ar to my knowledge the most powerful palatable natural antioxidants. See this study testing the antioxidant content of more than 3000 foods:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841576/pdf/1475-2891-9-3.pdf

    In addition it has shown to inhibit tumors:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20812284

    Finally it costs about a dollar a month and may work as well as a leading diabetes drug without the side effects:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21495900

    Michael Greger MD has a non-profit website where all this information is conveniently summarized into videos with study citations. See:
    http://nutritionfacts.org/

  4. I might suggest as a conspiratorial nature, that if men had found a way of using minerals and herbs to greatly extend life that it would most probably have been kept very secret and only past down to whom that group of people thought worthy of that knowledge. Therefore you would have never heard of it and won’t.

  5. I am searching for a word for longevity supplements, would that be “longevite” Anyway, instead of rabbits, mice and rats, we need an Ames test for longevity substances. I would suggest at the least we start screening at the yeast level, before we work up the evolutionary ladder to the higher organisms. It does appear to me that the same aging mechanisms appear in yeast as in humans, namely free radical attack on cell membranes and DNA in mitochondria, resulting in a reduction of ATP, leading to failure of all the rest of the cellular systems due to lack of energy.

    • The free radical theory of aging has been thoroughly discredited. http://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/19/anti-oxidants-a-disappointment-or-worse/

      We all agree that it is more convenient to study aging in short-lived species like yeast and flies and worms. All this work has yielded a trove of insight, some of which transfers to humans. The trouble is that most tricks that extend life span in flies and worms don’t work in mice (and presumably not in humans).

      • I don’t think we can entirely discard MTFRA. In my view there are multiple aging programs running in parallel, the most notably being chronically elevated mTOR, which leads to hyperfunction and all of the dreaded diseases of aging. Even in the absences of mTOR, accumulated mito damage will eventually lead to organ failure and death.

  6. I have tried rhodiola a two different times. I’m not sure what the mechanism is but it made me feel strange and perhaps a little jittery both times. It was unpleasant so I never took it again. Like you say everyone is different and we need to experiment a little.

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