Living longer all in the genes

Can you imagine the day when popping a pill for diabetes is all it takes, or the day when a cure for heart disease is discovered? Australian geneticist Professor David Sinclair, who has spent years researching ways to develop medicines to keep the aged free of diseases well into old age, is one of those people who can imagine this day.

Professor Sinclair says he can imagine a future where 90-year-olds play tennis with their great grandchildren and is one of the experts who think DNA from very old healthy people could offer clues to how they lived so long, eventually leading to possible medicines to help the rest of the population stay disease-free for longer.

“We are not talking about an extra 100 years or anything, but I think gradually we will learn how to make people get through their 50s, 60s and 70s without any disability or disease,” Professor Sinclair says.

Professor Sinclair has focused his work on sirtuins, which is a class of gene which controls the ageing process and conditions associated with old age such as neurodegeneration.

Laboratory tests conducted by Professor Sinclair show when mice are given more sirtuins, they can live up to 25% longer and are protected from heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even cancer.

He has been developing synthetic molecules that ‘switch on’ sirtuins in the body in the hope one day they will form the basis of drugs to protect people from the effects of ageing.

“A main effect of these molecules, including resveratrol, is to boost up the energy [producers] of the body, the mitochondria,” Professor Sinclair says.

Happy and healthy ageing is possible…

Professor Sinclair was joined by Professor Susan Greenfield, who delivered the University of NSW’s 2011 Medicine Dean’s Lecture on the possibility of happy and healthy ageing.

Professor Greenfield has devised an idea called The Second Fifty Years Scheme, which, if successful, would team up older workers with young graduates to help them set up businesses.

Instead of retiring in their 60s, people could choose to receive seed funding from the government to set up a business with a graduate who had all the latest skills in a particular field but not the experience of the older worker.

However, for such a plan to succeed, Professor Greenfield claims society’s attitude towards elderly people must change.

“It should be something you are working towards and celebrate rather than something you dread and fear,” she tells AAP. “There’s no reason why you automatically have to decline,” she adds.

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