It’s late and for some inexplicable reason I feel uninspired to write about politics. Not that there is anything going on at the moment, eh. Go figure.
Inexplicable ennui notwithstanding the Washington Post just ran with a piece that will likely get lost in the melee if some enterprising blogger (me) doesn’t catch it first. Some of you remember that a while back I went on about groundbreaking ideas coming from a researcher at Harvard, David Sinclair, who thought that he had a handle on the biochemical mechanism behind the negative effects of growing old. Specifically Sinclair used a biochemical assay of his own design to identify a compound that at least appeared to push back the ill effects of aging and disease. What’s more, for reasons that have to do with yeast and redox chemistry the only natural place that you find this compound, resveratrol, is in a bottle of red wine.
Well before Sinclair’s time we knew that animals fed a starvation diet lived a lot longer and did a better job of resisting disease. Fine as far as it goes, but who wants to live like that? For some reason the North Korea Diet never took off. As is often the case Sinclair made progress by turning the question around. What if you made the body think that you’re starving? He narrowed his question to the DNA repair pathway and identified a shockinly potent activator called resveratrol that interacted with a novel set of DNA binding proteins that he called Sirtuins.
Armed with the right tools reagent Sinclair and competitors first showed that normally-fed animals live longer when you add resveratrol. Eliminating sirtuin proteins also eliminated resveratrol’s influence on longevity, placing the proteins in the same pathway as the drug. Since then resveratrol has turned up in studies on an amazing number of maladies; to get a sense of the scope try this link to Google Scholar and add any given illness to the search terms.
It seems reasonable to trick a body consuming a normal diet to think that it isn’t getting enough food. Sure, most of us wouldn’t fit into our prom outfit anymore but with a gym membership and a healthy dose of free timemost of us can get pretty close. For a body with serious eating and weight problems the answer is not nearly as clear. It seems improbable that one compound acting on one pathway can negate complicated problems including horomone cocktails produced by excess fat tissue, insulin disorders, cardiovascular weakness and more, yet that is exactly what Sinclair’s group claims to have found. From the WaPo article:
The substance, called resveratrol, enabled mice that were fed a high-calorie, high-fat diet to live normal, active lives despite becoming obese — the first time any compound has been shown to do that. Tests found the agent activated a host of genes that protect against aging, essentially neutralizing the adverse effects of the bad diet on the animals’ health and longevity.
[…] “This represents a likely major landmark,” said Stephen L. Helfand, who studies the molecular genetics of aging at Brown University. “This really pushes the field forward. It’s quite exciting.”The research, published online by the journal Nature, helps explain a host of observations that have long intrigued researchers, including why French people tend to get fewer heart attacks even though they have high-fat diets and why severely restricting the amount of calories that animals ingest makes them live longer.
Keep in mind that resveratrol treatment hovers in about the same promising what-if stage as stem cell therapy, waiting on numerous clinical trials and safety studies whose results are not preordained. But if the promise pans out it is almost impossible to overstate the consequences that resveratrol could have on daily life. The preventative aspects alone could force a major realignment in healthcare priorities – if you were an insurance company, wouldn’t you want your clients taking the stuff? If it holds down the claim rate then Resveratrol treatment would easily pay for itself. Resveratrol seems relatively cheap and simple to manufacture even at the current niche-market level of production (judging by the chemical structure, aspirin should be harder to make) so the promise of lifespan and health won’t even stratify that easily along class lines the way much of our current healthcare does.
To footnote this post, I don’t have the numbers on hand but I did have the chance to stop and chat with Dr. Sinclair some years back when he swung through my department on a speaking engagement. He told me that wine doesn’t have quite enough of the chemical to offer a real therapeutic effect without risking other problems – liver damage, for example, or DUI arrests. But, he acknowledged, an occasional glass can’t hurt.
Pb
Yeah, I noticed the same thing today, although it was about Iraq instead, and I first saw someone link to it in the comments here somewhere.
TenguPhule
So who wants to make a wager on how long until the Right Wingers call for an invasion of France to secure those vital vineyards for the good of the Republic?
Tom in Texas
LOL according to the NYT article on the topic, a 150 lb. human would have to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of wine a day to get the amount of Resveratrol the mice were getting. I doubt one would live long enough to notice their liver failing or to get arrested. That being said, if they need a subject for human trials, I am available.
Pb
Indeed, in fact, you can already buy nutritional supplements of it, for less than the cost of many prescription drugs out there, I’m sure.
craigie
How American. The Holy Grail is a substance that lets you eat nothing but Krispy Kremes and still live to be 100. Toothless, but 100.
Beej
The hell with Krispy Kremes, bring on the Dove Bars!
Jess
Allow me to be persnickity for a moment and point out that the calorie restriction method is based on eating nutritionally-concentrated foods and nothing extra–no empty calories. I’ve been doing a moderate version of this for years, and once you’re at your optimal weight you are not starving yourself–in fact you rarely feel extremely hungry because you’re getting all the nutrition you need. Very different from the peaks and lows of the typical American junk-food diet. And it seems to work–I’m much more healthy than most people my age, despite being contantly sick as a child.
BadTux
You seem to be deluded about how health insurance companies operate in the United States. The goal of pretty much all health insurance companies in the US today is what you’d expect: To pay out as little as possible while taking in as much money in premiums as possible. It’s called “capitalism”. Duh.
Now, you’re saying to me “if the insurer doesn’t pay out money, people will get sicker!” But that brings up the other problem. Because health insurance in the US is tied to the employer rather than to the individual, the health insurance company is betting that, by the time you get sicker, you’ll be with a different employer and thus a different health insurance company. In short, they’re gambling that you’ll be with another insurer by the time their penny pinching catches up with you.
Add in one last thing: Federal law pretty much prohibits lawsuits against health insurers if health insurers fail to pay out their contractually-obligated claims. In short, there’s no way to force them to pay claims even if you somehow manage to stay with the same insurance company.
So it doesn’t matter if a new treatment comes out that would reduce medical expenses by 20% over the long term. The health insurance companies won’t pay for it. Because over the long term, you’re someone else’s problem.
Needless to say, the whole system is utterly broken in so many ways I cannot count them. One of the ways it is broken is that it will not pay for preventative care, because each insurance company wants to pay out as little as possible today because you won’t be with them tomorrow so preventing big costs tomorrow isn’t a plus on their balance sheets. HMO’s were supposed to change that. But reality is that HMO’s aren’t doing it either.
How to fix it? Well, for one thing, it’s time to admit that the American experiment in employer-provided health insurance is an utter failure. I don’t know what needs to replace it, but there’s plenty of good systems out there. For example, the #1 and #2 health care systems in the world are the French and Swiss health care systems. They have completely opposite ways of handling things which I won’t go into here, but the important part is that the Swiss system, which is probably the closest to the American system, has insurance purchased by individuals, not by employers. And both systems provide universal coverage, either via a government insurance company similar to Medicare funded by payroll taxes, or via subsidies for those not able to afford full cost of insurance.
This is important. Universal coverage is the only way to prevent reservoirs of disease from lingering in the population, reservoirs which can mutate and explode into epidemics that kill insured as well as uninsured. The 1918 flu epidemic is a classic example, which killed 20 to 40 million people and depressed the average lifespan of Americans by 10 years as well as killing tens of thousands of American soldiers in Europe, but any serious disease which is allowed to linger in the population due to lack of universal health care can mutate that way. For example, there is a new strain of TB slowly spreading that is extremely virulent and completely resistant to any known antibiotic. TB is normally easy to treat, but by failing to have universal coverage, a reservoir of TB infection has been allowed to linger in the population, and it is slowly mutating. It will take just one more mutation and we’ll have a TB epidemic to match any in history — a TB epidemic that will affect rich as well as poor, insured as well as uninsured. That is the cost of lack of universal health care — epidemics that kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people, including those who *do* have access to health care.
So anyhow, do keep following all the recent advances in preventative care. Just realize that until health care is fixed in the United States, you’ll have to pay for it out of your own pocket, because it simply doesn’t pay for an insurer to do so when some other insurance company will get the benefit at your next job switch.
-Badtux the Medical Penguin
tregen
VOTE… spread the word
chopper
that’s why i drink *fortified* wine.
Randy
Let me get this straight — under Clinton we had eight years of Americans dying unnecessarily because they weren’t told about the benefits of drinking wine. Can we safely add all of the people who died of heart disease from 1993 to 2001 to that Clinton body count list?
Bart Motes
Seems great but nothing on the market right now is going to do it for you. I just ordered some off of amazon.com– Resveratrol 60 Caps
$6.79 – Quantity: 6 – In Stock
Condition: new
Sold by: Swanson Health Products
It proports to provide 5mg per capsule. The only problem is that apparently Dr. Sinclair is taking the low end which is 5mg per kilogram of body weight. That means that my six bottle supply, if I take it at that dosage, would only serve me for less than 6 days. I think I’m going to compromise by taking ten capsules a day, with a glass of red wine, in case there are any micronutrient activators that the study isn’t accounting for. That and cross my fingers for a more effective delivery system, because taking 70+ capsules a day isn’t going to do it for many people.
quipmeister
The thing about resveratrol that is often missed is that it is more soluble in alcohol, so you pretty much have to take it in wine format – pill form might not be absorbed as well.