Excerpted from The New York Times
- September 16, 2006
Given that some athletes will take almost anything to gain a one percent edge in performance, what might they do for a 100 percent improvement? That temptation is made somewhat more real by a report in a leading journal about a drug that doubles the physical endurance of mice running on treadmills.
An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer - five-eights of a mile - on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol run twice as far.
They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.
"Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training," Dr. Auwerx (pronounced OH-wer-ix) said in an interview.
He and his colleagues said the same mechanism seems likely to operate in humans, based on their analysis, in a group of Finnish subjects, of the gene that is influenced by the drug.
Their rationale for testing Resveratrol was evidence obtained three years ago that it could activate a genetic mechanism known to protect mice against the degenerative diseases of aging and to prolong their lifespan by 30 percent.
Dr. Auwerx, whose interest is in the genetic control of metabolism, decided to see if resveratrol would offset the effects of a high-fat diet, specifically the metabolic disturbances, known as metabolic syndrome, that are the precursors of diabetes and obesity.
In his report, he and his colleagues say that very large doses of resveratrol protected mice from gaining weight and from developing metabolic syndrome.
He found that their muscle fibers had been remodeled by the drug into the type more prevalent in trained human athletes.
Dr. Ronald M. Evans, a leading expert on the hormonal control of metabolism at the Salk Institute, said that the report by Dr. Auwerx's team had shown very convincingly that Resveratrol improves mitochondrial function and fends off metabolic disease.
Dr. Evans described the study as "very important, because it is rare that we identify orally active molecules, especially natural molecules, that have such a broad-based, positive effect on a problem as widespread in society as metabolic disease."
A drug that prolongs life, averts degenerative disease and, on top of all that, makes you into a champion athlete at least if you are a mouse sounds almost too good to be true.
Dr. Christoph Westphal, Sirtriss chief executive, replied to this objection with a question: "Is it too good to be true that when you are young you get no disease?" He believes that activation of the sirtuins is what keeps the body healthy in youth, but that these enzymes become less powerful with age, exposing the body to degenerative disease. That is the process that he says is reversed by resveratrol and, he hopes, by the more powerful sirtuin-activator drugs that his company is developing, though many years of clinical trials will still be needed to demonstrate whether they work and are safe to use
