All people grow old - this is nature, a given, a fact. Now, as you read this, you are getting old, inevitably approaching your finale. But old age is not only a decrepit body that is constantly sick and falling apart, but also a state of mind.

And this state may not depend on the biological age of a person. How often have you heard that you can grow old at 20? Everything is interconnected, and if you have grown old in soul, the body will certainly correspond.

Premature aging: causes and signs

In addition to the age that is written in the passport, each person has a personal rate of aging - biological age. Scientists have long noticed that some people age earlier, while others stay young longer. Probably, you yourself have seen this more than once, and maybe even noticed it yourself.

In addition to the genetically determined pace, the rate of aging is affected by the amount of stress that causes unhealthy reactions to the world. Early old age has all the symptoms of "burnout" such as hypochondria, anxiety and a tendency to hysteria.

So, if there is a person in your environment who starts screaming and stomping their feet for any insignificant reason, it may be a “young old man”. And it turns out that there are not so few of them.

In 38% of Russians, the biological age is 7-9 years older than the passport one, and, most often, such people weigh more, get sick more often, and, in general, are weaker than their peers, whose biological age matches the date in the passport.

Of course, scientists decided to identify the causes of such a "disease", and it turned out that directly affected by the standard of living.

“Young old people” usually earn little, live in communal apartments or cramped, old apartments, do not have a decent education, eat poorly and raise two or more children. Such people move little and hate their work.

I.e, aging is directly related to the satisfaction that a person receives from life.

Another reason for early aging is the fact that a person stops learning. This can happen for various reasons, and educational institutions have nothing to do with it. You can study all your life, learn something new, and at the same time never be a student.

So, the causes of early aging:

1. Dissatisfaction with life
2. Decreased mobility
3. Arrest in development (training)

What to do in order not to grow old prematurely?

Eat less, move more

To give specific examples of extended youth, you can pay attention to centenarians - as a rule, they stay young longer, maintain health, mobility and a clear mind longer. Some - until death.

There are centenarians in almost any country, only their number may differ. Probably, many have heard that Japan is famous for its centenarians. The average life expectancy there is 83.91 years. Also excellent performance in the Scandinavian countries and in France.

One of the reasons for such a percentage of centenarians in these countries can be considered a diet - in Japan and Scandinavia they eat a lot of seafood, and in France it is customary to eat small portions and eat slowly. Japan has a very low percentage of obesity - only about 3%, and in the Scandinavian countries about 70% of the population go in for outdoor sports.

From interviews with various centenarians, it can be concluded that most of them ate quite modestly. In addition, centenarians tend to work hard. So the phrase from the famous cartoon can be considered a secret about how to keep youth longer and live longer.

keep learning

From the very first day, a person learns and learns the world, discovers something new for himself.

An interesting fact: the largest percentage of people whose passport age is very different from the psychological one was found among thirty-year-olds.

By the age of thirty, it may seem to a person that he has already studied everything that is necessary for him for life, has acquired a specialty in which he will do the same for the rest, and stopped in development. This decision is invariably followed by aging.

When a person stops learning, he enters the stage of aging. A.A. Zinoviev

Because like it

Back in 1860, Karl May, traveling around the Caucasus, where there was always a large percentage of centenarians, noted that people live long, because they like it.

A large number of acquaintances, relatives and neighbors, mutual assistance, warm relations - all this helps to eliminate fear, loneliness, despondency and depressive moods. It turns out that the most important thing is psychological comfort and enjoyment of life.

Warm family ties help Italians live longer, despite the fact that Italy is one of the most smoking countries in Europe. The average life expectancy there is 77 years (in Russia - 69). High rates outside of Europe - in Cuba (76 years), and, again, one of the reasons for this is called the natural optimism and cheerfulness of the Cubans.

And in conclusion, I would like to combine all the reasons and advice with the opinion of Lyudmila Belozerova, the professor who created the method for determining biological age:

Material well-being means a lot for prolonging youth, but attitude to life also plays a huge role. People who age slowly, as a rule, move a lot and with pleasure, work hard, eat everything, but little by little, optimistic and friendly to others.

For the scientist and Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, the study of the main question of mankind " How and why we age? It started with ooze… She was engaged in the study of chromosomes, and in particular the “caps” that are at their ends, the so-called telomeres. Tina has become an excellent material for experiments, giving the scientist the opportunity to put their ideas into practice.

Telomeres are special parts at the end of each chromosome that are directly involved in the process of cell division, they protect the copied DNA during this process. As a result of division, telomeres wear out. Protecting DNA, they gradually shorten, and at the end of the cycle they die along with the cell.

But this process was observed only in human cells... Watching mud, Elizabeth noticed one strange feature: her cells never grew old and did not die. Over time, their telomeres did not shorten, but even became longer. What contributed to the eternal youth of algae?

It turned out that the cause of this phenomenon was a special enzyme - telomerase, which helps to restore telomeres. When Elizabeth extracted telomerase from the mud, her cells began to age rapidly and soon died. But do not think that the cherished elixir of youth has been found, and you just need to have a bottle of telomerase with you in order to restore health. The fact is that an excess of this enzyme in the body provokes the development of malignant neoplasms.

The scientist became interested in how you can independently control the length of telomeres, and through them the state of your own health. Physiologist Elissa Epel came to her aid, a woman conducted a study that showed how constant stressful situations affect telomere length. It turned out that people who were under constant stress had low levels of telomerase, and their telomeres became many times shorter.

Other scientists also became interested in the study of telomeres, and this is what they managed to find out in the course of their experiments.

How not to get old

We all have the ability to influence our telomeres and health, let's not forget that! Be sure to share useful information with your friends ...

Life without old age No

What to do in order not to grow old?

What to do in order not to grow old?

If you are reading this chapter, then we can congratulate you - you will soon understand how this book differs from all other books on aging, which are very exciting, harmoniously proving this or that theory, full of interesting examples and daunting calculations. But the books of the best gerontologists always leave open the most important question - "So what?". That is, your story was wonderful, fascinating, but what is all this for? What to do in order not to grow old? In response - either silence, or a set of very correct platitudes: drink less, do not smoke, do not go "to the left", do not forget about physical activity. Amazing! That is, the meaning of an ordinary book about aging is to tell about how it was interesting for the author to deal with this problem and, at the same time, do nothing to help the aging reader. No wonder, then, that gerontological research is so poorly funded.

The authors of this book are not professional gerontologists. We work in the fields of biophysics, biochemistry and molecular biology, that is, in its purest form, experimenters. This means that any theory, hypothesis that cannot be tested by experiment is meaningless for us. The fact is that biology is still such a young science that in the vast majority of cases we cannot do anything. prove strictly. The systems that biologists work with are so complex and poorly understood that any fact, the results of any experience, can have several explanations, sometimes mutually exclusive. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians here probably grabbed their heads - and This you call science? If you can’t really prove anything, then what can be the criteria for the correctness of your work?

In fact, everything is very simple: a hypothesis must predict something. That is, having formulated an assumption, you assert on its basis that such and such experiments should give such and such results. Then the corresponding experiments are put, and if the results coincide with those predicted, then you are right, and you can move on in proving your scheme. This is how modern biology and the “evidence-based medicine” based on it are arranged.

Now let's formulate what the scheme that we presented to you in the previous chapters predicts.

1) Individual cells and organisms can die not spontaneously, but following the genetic program laid down in them.

2) Aging seems to be one such program of slow suicide. At the same time, some species of living beings do not have it - they do not age. Although all organisms eventually die: eternal youth does not mean eternal life! People are not lucky - we have an aging program and it is still working.

3) There is every reason to believe that the aging of mammals, including humans, is arranged through the slow poisoning of their own body with some kind of "muck" that this body itself produces.

4) The best candidates for the role of this "muck" are reactive oxygen species (ROS), and not all of them, namely those that produce the "power plants" of our cells - mitochondria.

The experiment suggests itself - so let's reduce the production of ROS in the mitochondria of our cells and see if aging slows down? No sooner said than done!

1.7.1. Antioxidants to extinguish the focus of aging

So, we decided to reduce the amount of mitochondrial ROS and see if it would keep us young longer. And now we will have to explain to you what a huge amount of work is required for this experiment and why, until very recently, it was fundamentally impossible.

We hypothesized that the mitochondria are slowly killing us, following the commands of some genetic program. If this is true, then it would seem that the surest way to defeat old age is to find those genes in which the aging program is written and turn them off. It happens that it is enough to replace one letter (nucleotide) in a gene, and it will stop working. The problem is that such a method cannot be applied to a person, since its consequences are irreversible. How are genetically modified animals obtained? Take, say, mice - parents, over them, or rather - over their germ cells, certain manipulations are carried out, and they offspring one or another gene is turned off. By transferring this technology to a person, we will first get genetically modified children (!), who do not have the gene we have chosen in all the cells of his body. What if we were wrong? We will not be able to return this gene. What if he not only participates in the aging program, but also performs some other important, yet unknown function?

Not a single biologist in the world now undertakes to predict all the consequences of the removal of one single gene in humans. And if so, then no experiments on genetic modification healthy people can't go!

Of course, the most radical way to interfere in human genetics is described above. There are others - for example, to infect a person with a virus that can insert its genes into the DNA of certain human tissues or to make genetically modified stem cells and inject them into him. At the same time, however, it will not be possible to achieve changes in genes in 100% of the cells of the body, and all risks will remain. That is, if something went wrong, then there will be no way back, as in the case of genetically modified children.

To finally convince you of the impossibility of genetic modification of people, we note that if our assumptions about the aging program are correct, this extremely risky procedure will have to be carried out on healthy young people in the hope that they will age more slowly. Even if there are selfless volunteers, who will need thousands, what scientist in their right mind will be able to take responsibility for such an experiment?!

So what to do? We know that a deadly program is running inside of us, counting down our lives, but nothing can be done? Not everything is so bad. Genes don't do anything by themselves. They are just a code, by reading which the cell synthesizes the main molecules of life - proteins. Proteins perform a variety of functions - with their help, all kinds of biochemical reactions occur, signals are transmitted from one system to another, proteins serve as the main building material for all cellular structures. Including for our beloved mitochondria. That is, our malicious program makes some mitochondrial proteins work "to the detriment" and produce reactive oxygen species. With this, perhaps, nothing can be done with modern means. But you can try intercept these reactive oxygen radicals before they cause trouble.

Substances that can neutralize ROS are well known: antioxidants. There are a great many of them, they are natural: vitamin C, vitamin E, coenzyme Q, green tea flavonoids, resveratrol from red wine. There are also synthetic ones: N-acetylcysteine, idebenone, trolox, etc. In the 60-70s of the XX century, when scientists discovered the harmfulness of free radicals and reactive oxygen species, a real boom in antioxidants began. What kind of magical properties were not attributed to them and where only they were not added! You can feel the echoes of this boom even now by looking at the store shelves: “The latest antioxidant cosmetics!”, “Antioxidant-based dietary supplements!”, “Green tea antioxidant balm rinse!” etc.

The two authors of this book are now in their 40s, and we have been taking vitamin C from a young age. We must honestly admit that we have already noticeably aged compared to what we were 17 years ago in the 5th year of the biological faculty of Moscow State University. Just like everyone else who takes antioxidants. What's the matter? Are reactive oxygen species harmful? - Harmful. Do Antioxidants Fight Them? - Fight. Why is there no effect? Because a living organism is very complex, this is not a “spherical horse in a vacuum”!

In ancient times, the human body was perceived by naturalists as a waterskin filled with blood. If you poke it with something sharp, blood will flow, and if it is not stopped, then the person will die. If you want to treat a person, you give him some drug, it mixes with blood inside, heals it and the person gets better. Pretty soon, the ancient Aesculapius found out that not everything is so simple. Inside a person there are different organs. They have different functions and properties, and that, for example, air for the lungs is good, but air bubbles inside the heart can mean death. Then, following the old logic, organs began to be considered wineskins. Relatively recently, in the middle of the 19th century, it was discovered that organs and tissues consist of individual living cells. And many substances traveling through the blood and organs do not get into the cells.

Cells can live their own lives, perform different functions, die, "go crazy", turning into cancer cells, etc. In short, it's all about the cells. And according to the ancient scientific tradition, they were declared "skins". Until now, many biologists and almost all physicians, for simplicity, consider cells to be small bubbles filled with water, inside of which, of course, there are some structures, but this is not very important. There are free radicals inside - you add an antioxidant and the cell should feel better. Unfortunately, it's not like that.

Aging is not an explosion, but rather

SLOW, DELICATE SMELLING INSIDE THE ORGANISM. If MORE DEFINITELY - INSIDE THE CELLS, IF STILL EXACTLY - INSIDE

mitochondria. Pour this smoldering

THE FOCUS OF AGING IS POSSIBLE WITH EXACT DOSES

antioxidant. How to deliver the antioxidant there and only there?

The interior of the cell is strictly structured. There is practically no "free" water. Like the body, cells have separate organs. To avoid confusion, they are called "organelles". Some of the organelles are tightly isolated by membranes from the rest of the cell space. And even these organelles are not "skins" with protoplasm, but are ordered and very well-functioning structures.

We tell you all this not only to brag about what an infinitely complex thing we are dealing with. Simply, as we wrote at the beginning of this book, it is impossible to understand the problem of aging and ways to solve it without a modern view of biology. And there is no place for the concept of "waterskins" in it.

So, mitochondrion is such an isolated organelle. And if you want to neutralize the reactive oxygen species formed by it, then the antioxidant must be delivered exactly to the address - into the inner membrane of the mitochondria. And there, with an accuracy of several nanometers, place it next to the proteins that carry out respiration and form ROS. Because the task is not to allow the free oxygen radical to unleash a chain reaction in the mitochondrial membrane, that is, roughly speaking, to "set fire" to the membrane.

Of course, if you properly pump the cell with an antioxidant, then, in the end, these molecules will also reach the mitochondria. And even somehow they will fight against the AFC. But there are a number of points that make such an approach impossible.

a) It is necessary to give very large doses of the antioxidant, which may already have bad side effects. For all biologically active substances there is such a thing as an overdose, and for an antioxidant it means a change in the sign of its effect from anti- to pro-oxidant.

b) In general, reactive oxygen species are necessary for life. In small quantities. For example, with their help, cells of the immune system kill harmful microbes. In addition, micro-amounts of free radicals serve to transmit a number of signals from one cell to another, they are involved in some useful chemical reactions. If we flood the entire body with antioxidant, then all these vital processes risk being strangled.

c) Most likely, it will not be possible to achieve such colossal doses of antioxidant inside the cell. The fact is that existing antioxidants are either natural substances or their close analogues. Such compounds are familiar to our body, it knows how to determine when they become too much, and it has special systems that bind, break down and remove excess of such substances from the body.

Therefore, despite the fact that the key role of reactive oxygen species in aging has been known since the 1960s, it has not been possible to solve this problem with the help of antioxidants. This does not mean that antioxidants are completely useless. In no case! There are a number of conditions when a real explosion of free radical production occurs in the cell and even in the tissue around it. For example, with myocardial infarction. And then it is extremely useful to “fill this fire” with a powerful antioxidant - for example, coenzyme Q. Many medicines are made on its basis, shown to people with heart pathologies. But aging is not an explosion. It is a slow, delicate smoldering from within. And quite from the inside. From within the mitochondria. So how to deliver the antioxidant there and only there?

1.7.2. Iona Skulachev: the history of the term

As you remember from the previous chapter, the mitochondrion works like a power plant and, in the process of respiration, “charges” its inner membrane like a capacitor (plus outside, minus inside). The inner membrane of the mitochondria is a very good insulator because it does not allow ordinary charged particles to pass through. But if a charged particle (ion) is surrounded by voluminous water-repellent organic residues, then the membrane will cease to be an insurmountable barrier for the ion. The idea to use such substances - "penetrating ions" for the study of mitochondria was born at the turn of the 1960s-1970s. The author of this book and his group from Moscow State University, together with the group of E.A. Lieberman from the Institute of Biophysics found that penetrating positively charged ions, i.e. cations are able to selectively penetrate into mitochondria and accumulate there. Minus - inside the mitochondria, do you remember? It was these experiments that led to the discovery of "mitochondrial" electricity. It also turned out that penetrating cations are a convenient tool for studying biological membranes; soon they began to be actively used by researchers around the world, and in 1974 the famous American biochemist D. Green called them "Skulachev ions".

And in 1970 S.E. Severin, L.S. Yaguzhinsky and V.P. Skulachev made an assumption that later played a decisive role in the development of a new generation of antioxidants. The authors suggested that cations penetrating the membrane can be used as "electric locomotive molecules" for the accumulation in mitochondria of uncharged substances attached to these cations. In other words, to deliver something useful to the mitochondria, it is necessary to attach this “something” to the Skulachev ion, and the whole structure will inevitably end up in the mitochondria.

True, such a substance, if it is added outside the cell, will still have to overcome its outer shell - the plasma membrane. But even here luck is on the side of Skulachev's ions - the plasma membrane of the cells is also charged, and the minus is inside the cell, and the plus is outside. That is, the Skulachev ions will be actively drawn into the cell, in order to then go to the mitochondria.

You probably already guessed where we are going. If we need an antioxidant inside the mitochondria, let's sew it to the Skulachev ion and get a mitochondria-targeted antioxidant. Meet the Substance SkQ1

The left side of the formula is the most powerful antioxidant from plant chloroplasts - plastoquinone (hence the letter Q in the name of the substance - in English quinone is written as quinone). Next comes the decia - a "bundle" of a strictly defined length, which allows you to accurately position the antioxidant inside the membrane. Above is the organic decyltriphenylphosphonium ion, which is the classic "Skulachev ion" (Fig. 6.1).

And figure 6.2 shows what a flask with this brown glassy substance looks like.

In itself, it is very strange, poorly soluble in both water and oil. Not too stable, afraid of light. It feels good only where it is meant to be - inside biological membranes. More precisely, at the boundary between the membrane and the aqueous phase. At the beginning of our research, we could not learn how to work with it. For example, you take a test tube, pour a diluted SkQ1 solution into it, take the solution back in a minute, analyze it - SkQ1 has disappeared! A rumor went around the laboratories of our project about the terrible instability of the substance. But we are not just studying its properties, we are making a cure for old age. But what would such a medicine look like: a sealed ampoule stored in liquid nitrogen; it is taken out of liquid nitrogen and thawed in a very special thermostat; after that, the poor patient has only a few seconds to drink it! Can you imagine how much all this would cost the unfortunate?

Fortunately, it turned out not to be low stability. SkQ1 did not disappear. He ceased to be detected, because he stuck to the walls of a plastic test tube. There he was most comfortable: a fat body - on plastic, and a charged head - in the water. Now we have already learned how to deal with this problem, and SkQ1 solutions are stored for years.

1.7.3. SkQ as an interrupter of the aging program

Imagine that you are a biologist, an employee of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. You're wearing glasses, a white coat over a frayed sweater and jeans, and you're standing in the middle of a laboratory lost somewhere inside the grandiose university complex on Sparrow Hills in Moscow. In your hands you have a flask with 10 grams of a brown glassy substance SkQ1, which should slow down aging. From an iron cage standing on a laboratory table, two white rats are looking at you with interest, wondering if they will be fed something tasty or offered a fun run in a maze. Outside the window, the distant howl of an ambulance siren is heard, carrying a hopeless patient through Moscow traffic jams to the hospital. Your actions?

We don't live in a Hollywood movie, so definitely NOT worth it:

> immediately swallow the contents of this flask whole to become the immortal McCloud;

> to burn the contents of this flask entirely with oneself in order to take to the grave the secret of immortality, which nature has kept from man for so many centuries;

> urgently call your friend in Seoul to secretly sell these 10 grams of a miracle substance to a multinational corporation for a billion dollars;

> chase the ambulance in your Zhiguli to save at least one dying person;

> feed laboratory rats SkQ1 in order to find out the next day that they have not aged during this time, and then go on the same Zhiguli to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize.

Instead, as it should be for a scientist in glasses, a sweater and jeans, you need to put the flask in the refrigerator, add food to the rats and ... think.

Where did this substance come from? From the assumption that it can slow down the human aging process. Our goal is to test this assumption. How to do it? Well... we should feed more people with the substance and watch them age. That is, call the Moscow University newspaper (or even Moskovsky Komsomolets?) and advertise that volunteers are needed for a life-long experiment to slow down aging. Surely there will be a hundred or two desperate people who will not mind trying. Again, unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), we do not live in Bulgakov's novel, and this cannot be done.

Let's think about how a new substance can get into inside human? There are two main options: we put either food and drink or medicines into our mouths. All kinds of dietary supplements, about which the reader must have heard, are Biologically Active Supplements to food, designed to compensate for the lack of one or another natural substance in the human diet. They can only include what a person can already find in nature. As we already know, SkQ1 is not a natural substance.

It is “made up out of my head” in order to interrupt the implementation of just a completely natural, natural program of death from old age. There is only one option - medicine.

And this is a very correct option. Because the main principle of creating any medicine is do no harm! First of all, the developer must prove that his drug is safe. But the medicine has another important parameter - the indication for use, in other words, the disease that this medicine should treat. For SkQ1, this indication is actually aging. But such a disease is not in medical reference books. Aging is a natural process and it would seem that it is impossible to treat it. Therefore, "in the forehead" the problem has no solution. SkQ1 cannot be used as a cure for old age simply because of the existing legislation in most countries!

THE MEDICINE HAS ONE ANOTHER IMPORTANT PARAMETER - INDICATION FOR USE, SIMPLY, THE DISEASE, WHICH SHOULD

treat this medicine. For SkQI this

THE INDICATION IS AGING IN GENERAL. But SUCH DISEASE IS NOT IN MEDICAL REFERENCES.

So what, take the flask out of the refrigerator and throw it away? Do not hurry. If the substance slows down the aging process, then it should be useful in the fight against senile diseases. In addition, let's not forget about the main property of the substance - it neutralizes free radicals produced by mitochondria. Aging is aging, but for many "classic" diseases, it has already been proven that ROS from mitochondria play a key role in causing harm to the body. That is, one can try to prove that SkQ1 treats some specific senile disease, and thus turn the brown substance in the flask into a normal medicine that can be bought at a pharmacy with a doctor's prescription. But after that, you need to carefully monitor what happens to patients taking SkQ1 as a medicine. According to our hypothesis, they should develop various signs of aging more slowly, develop age-related diseases less often, and so on. But formally, all this is like a pleasant side effect of the action of a “normal” medicine for a “normal” disease.

Oddly enough, the scenario described above is the only way to legally provide a person with a miracle substance that interrupts the aging program. Therefore, the scientist will have to change his sweater and jeans for a decent suit, in which he travels to conferences, and go ... in search of money for his project.

So, we found out that in order to test a simple hypothesis - does SkQ1 slow down the human aging process? - we need to make some medicine out of SkQ1. This is an extremely responsible decision, because a) drugs - they, as M.M. Zhvanetsky, "for internal use", i.e. it is necessary to exclude the possibility of any unpleasant side effects, b) in the modern world, the creation of a new drug costs a lot of money and takes a very long time. True, if you are successful and the drug enters the pharmaceutical market, then it can bring huge profits, which, in turn, is attractive to potential investors. That is, it is theoretically possible to find a risky person who is ready to invest a dozen or two million dollars and wait for the return of his money for 10-15 years. But not every scientist will take the risk of taking responsibility for such a project.

We decided to try. True, we did not rush headlong to create a drug, but first spent several years testing our hypothesis in experiments with animals. Everything is easier with them, and no drugs need to be registered for research. You can simply give them a substance dissolved in water. And they do not age for decades, but in the case of mice and rats, only 2-3 years. Actually, the scheme of the experiment is quite simple - from the “young claws” we start giving animals SkQ1 and see how fast they age compared to the control group, which did not get SkQ1. However, such an experiment still takes several years, and while it was going on, we conducted other studies on the properties of this unusual substance - the mitochondria-targeted antioxidant SkQ1. The results of these "first wave" experiments are described in more detail in the second part of the book, sections II.7.1-11.7.3. Here we provide only a brief summary. In a nutshell: more or less, as sometimes happens in biology, it was confirmed. Ions Skulachev SkQ1

a) penetrated artificial and biological membranes,

b) accumulated in mitochondria, effectively protecting them from free radicals,

c) saved cells from apoptotic death caused by free radicals,

d) protected individual organs: the heart, brain, kidneys - from the same oxidative damage,

e) extended the life of a variety of animals, including mammals, as well as fungi and plants, and, most importantly, delayed the development of a whole bunch of senile diseases in them.

We cannot help but present the very first bright result of the project. It was obtained in St. Petersburg in the laboratory of the chief experimental gerontologist of our country V.N. Anisimov, President of the Russian Gerontological Society. The experiment was carried out on the line of SHR mice, which live relatively shortly - about two years. At the same time, the animals were kept in the so-called. conventional vivarium. It did not carry out sterilization procedures for air, water and food and, as a result, mice were susceptible to natural infectious diseases inherent in these rodents. Both experimental and control animals simply lived their lives and eventually died of old age. The only difference is that in the experimental groups, small amounts of SkQ1 were mixed into the drinking water of mice from a very early age. The results of two independent experiments are summarized in Figs. 7 (Prof. V.N. Anisimov insisted on starting a second experiment when, six months after the start of work, he saw how much the experimental (with SkQ) and control groups differed).

This result was subsequently repeated in other strains of mice and rats, under different conditions - for details see the second part, sections 7.2 and 7.3. Here we want to pay attention to the shapes of the curves with SkQ. The curves themselves reflect what percentage of mice were alive in each group at any given time. As you can see, SkQ failed to somehow fundamentally increase the maximum lifespan of SHR mice by 10-15 percent, which may well be within the experimental error. But! Note how dramatically increased the number (percentage) of mice that survived to old age (500-600 days). Almost 2 times. Calculations show that SkQ doubled the average (median) lifespan of these animals. The reason for this prolongation of life becomes apparent simply by looking at photographs of control animals and mice treated with SkQ from early childhood (Fig. 7). In a very advanced 630 days (approximately this corresponds to 70-80 years in humans), the control animals “looked their age” - they were bald, hunched over due to spinal curvature, they were much more likely to suffer from infectious diseases, lose their whiskers (this is a sign that means that the mouse is no longer able to reproduce). The startling result is that none of the above happened to virtually any of the mice treated with SkQ! With the help of a fairly simple analysis, the staff of prof. Anisimov, they monitored the ability of mice to reproduce (they analyzed the regularity of the so-called estrous cycles of females). By the 500th day of life, more than half of the control females had an irregular cycle, while the vast majority of animals in the SkQ groups retained this cycle, and, consequently, the ability to reproduce. This means that, without fundamentally extending the maximum life span, SkQ is 2 times increased the period of youth of animals. If this is projected onto a person (it must be understood that this is a very bold assumption - we are still not mice, although we are also mammals), then it turns out that SkQ will not increase the maximum possible life expectancy - centenarians will live up to 100-120 years, as well as now. But at 60-70-80 years old, they will look and feel like 30-40 year olds. The period of youth will last and, accordingly, old age will be reduced. It is clear that such an option is much more preferable than simply increasing life expectancy by prolonging old age. The effects of SkQ, discovered in the now distant 2008 by the group of V.N. Anisimov, were subsequently confirmed in other laboratories. Now we even

We know many of the biochemical and physiological mechanisms underlying these effects. Read more about this in the second part of the book, and the most recent results - on the book's website on the Internet - 1 .

Independently of us in Japan, a biologist with a rare for this country surname Subota (through one “b”) and his colleagues from Tokyo published two papers in 2010 devoted to trying to really cure “dry eye”. In one of them, six-month-old rats were restricted in food by 35% for the next six months. One-year-old animals of the control group ate without restrictions. In addition, young (two-month-old) rats, also not restricted in their diet, were studied. As the results of the experiment showed, during the year of life in rats there are large degenerative changes in the lacrimal glands. The number of tear fluid producing cells and the level of proteins in it decrease, the concentrations of oxidized guanosine and oxynonenal (a product of lipid peroxidation) increase, and the structure of mitochondria in the cells of the lacrimal glands is sharply disturbed. All these adverse effects are greatly reduced (and some are completely canceled) by dietary restriction. Apparently, the lacrimal glands belong to early aging organs, and their aging is due to oxidative stress (for slowing down the aging program and reducing oxidative stress by restricting nutrition, see section II.7.4 in the second part). In the same year, 2010, Subota published the results of his own experiment. The fact is that since 1985, the Japanese researcher himself suffered from a severe form of the “dry eye” syndrome and tried to recover in the same way, by restricting food, which helped the animals so much. In 2001, he switched to a restricted diet. During the first year, no changes for the better happened. But at the beginning of the second year of life from hand to mouth, there was a steady increase in tear production, which continued into the third year (Fig. 8.1).

To get rid of painful phenomena, Saturday had to drip a tear substitute 50 times a day until 2008, and in 2009 - only twice. Saturday, inspired by his success, founded the Japan Dry Eye Society and stated that "in the not too distant future, this severe disease will be regarded as a treatable disease."

In a separate section of the second part of the book (11.7.4) we will specifically look at the similarities between the effects of our SkQ1 and food restriction. That is why this similarity encouraged us when planning the first clinical trials of SkQ1. In parallel, we tested the effect of SkQ1 on the aging of rat lacrimal glands. The results of an electron microscopic study conducted by L.E. Bakeeva and V.B. Saprunova are shown in fig. 8.2.

These micrographs show massive degradation of secretory cells in a 22-month-old rat compared to a 3-month-old. Degradation is not observed if the animal received SkQ1 2 with food.

But in fig. 9 shows one of the results of a clinical study of SkQ1 drops, conducted at the Moscow Institute. Helmholtz on patients with dry eye syndrome.

It can be seen that in 60% of cases a three-week course of SkQ1 led to the complete disappearance of the symptoms of the disease. The control group of patients received a very popular remedy - “tear natural”of one Western company (to be honest, it’s quite artificial mixture containing viscous polymers), which was effective only in 20% of cases. The nature of the effect of SkQ1 over time clearly shows that 60% in three weeks is not the limit and one can hope for an even higher percentage with longer treatment. However, it is already clear that SkQ1 acts much faster than food restriction in the experiment set on itself by Saturday.

Judging by the data of electron microscopy, in the case of SkQ1, as in the case of nutritional restriction, we are dealing with a true treatment of the lacrimal glands, and not with an attempt to replace tears with something artificial. The latter circumstance is of paramount importance, since tears, of course, perform, in addition to “lubrication”, many other functions that are vital for the eye. We are currently conducting longer-term clinical trials of SkQ1 drops (Vizomitin) in 10 clinics in Russia and Ukraine.