Human dietary supplement may be key to longer life

A popular dietary supplement used to treat arthritis may have the power to extend lifespan, a new study has claimed.
The widely used food supplement glucosamine promotes longevity in ageing mice by approximately 10 per cent due to improved glucose metabolism.
Michael Ristow, a professor at ETH Zurich, and his team found that the compound does so "by mimicking a low-carb diet in elderly mice reflecting human retirees".
Glucosamine has been freely available in drugstores for many decades. It is widely used to treat arthritis and to prevent joint degeneration, researchers said.
Moreover, glucosamine is known to delay cancer growth. In addition, glucosamine reduces metabolism of nutritive sugars, they said.

Ristow and his colleagues applied glucosamine to roundworms and found that they live around 5 per cent longer than their untreated counterparts.

Next, the researchers fed glucosamine to ageing mice in addition to their normal diet. The mice were 100 weeks of age, reflecting a comparative human age of approximately 65 years.
A control group of mice received no glucosamine while otherwise receiving an identical diet.
Feeding the supplement to mice extended their lifespan by almost 10 per cent, reflecting around 8 additional years of human lifespan.
Moreover, glucosamine improved glucose metabolism in elderly mice indicating protection from diabetes, a life-threatening disease most prevalent amongst the elderly.

Additional analyses revealed that glucosamine feeding promotes the breakdown of amino acids in both worms and mice.
"This reflects the metabolic state of a low-carb diet due to glucosamine supplementation alone - while these mice ingested the same amount of carbohydrates as their unsupplemented counterparts," Ristow said.
This implies that glucosamine would mimic a low-carb diet in humans as well - without the necessity of reducing the uptake of carbohydrates in our daily diet, researchers said.