Author response: Longevity is impacted by growth hormone action during early postnatal period
Year: 2017
Type: peer-review
Abstract: For decades, research has shown that early-life events that happen when animals, including humans,are developing as embryos can later influence how those animals look and behave as adults. However, little is known about if the hormones that drive an animal’s growth shortly after its birth have long-lasting effects too. For example, do growth hormones influence how quickly an animal will age, how healthy it is during adulthood, and how long it will go on to live? Sun et al. now show that increasing the levels of growth hormones in young mice for just six weeks can have a long-lasting effect on the animals’ lifespans. The experiments involved normal mice and dwarf mice, which are smaller and live for longer. From when they were one week old until they were seven weeks old, the mice were given either growth hormone or salty water as a negative control. As expected, the growth hormone helped the animals to grow longer and heavier. However, Sun et al. also found that this treatment significantly shortened the lives of the male dwarf mice, but not the female dwarf mice or the normal mice. Indeed, male dwarf mice given the growth hormone lived lives that were 20% shorter than those of male dwarf mice given the negative control, and further analyses suggested that they aged faster too. The biochemical processes that occur within a living animal in order to keep it alive are collectively referred to as the animal’s “metabolism”. Further experiments showed that the metabolism of adult dwarf mice that had been exposed to growth hormone at a young age was different from the dwarf mice that had been given the negative control instead. These metabolic changes could help to explain why exposure to growth hormone at an early stage in life can affect an animal into its adulthood. The next step will be to work out, in molecular detail, how exposure to growth hormone in early life has a long-lasting effect on aging and lifespan. Such studies might help scientists to understand more about how a person’s experiences during childhood could affect them in later life, including how it affects their risk of developing age-related diseases.
Language: English
Subfield: Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W2982753263