Go easy on glucose to live long, cancer-free life

2:41 AM // 0 comments // ngsk // Category: Health tips , News //

New studies by researchers at University of Alabama at Birmingham are revealing that the Human cells life will increase by reducing intake of calories mainly in the form of Glucose. This also helps in killing of pre-cancerous cells.

Trygve Tollefsbol, a researcher from Center for Aging and Comprehensive Cancer Center said, “This discovery of extending the lifespan of normal human cells by reduced calories will lead to further research on these types of effects on different cell types and also facilitates in development of novel approaches to extend the lifespan of humans”.

Hope these may help researches to move forward to find out improved prevention of cancer as well as many other age related diseases. As per the scientists, this can happen by indentifying how to control the intake of calories by specific cell types individually. These studies may also lead to the development of drugs and treatments that slow human aging and prevent cancer.

To make this discovery, Tollefsbol and colleagues used normal human lung cells and precancerous human lung cells that were at the beginning stages of cancer formation. Both sets of cells were grown in the laboratory and received either normal or reduced levels of glucose (sugar).

As the cells grew over a period of a few weeks, the researchers monitored their ability to divide, and kept track of how many cells survived over this period. They found that the normal cells lived longer, and many of the precancerous cells died, when given less glucose.

Gene activity was also measured under these same conditions. The reduced glucose caused normal cells to have a higher activity of the gene that dictates the level of telomerase, an enzyme that extends their lifespan and lower activity of a gene (p16) that slows their growth.

Epigenetic effects (effects not due to gene mutations) were found to be a major cause in changing the activity of these genes as they reacted to decreased glucose levels.

The study has been published online in The FASEB Journal.