Ecuadorian clan key to longevity: Report

TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
Published: February 17, 2011 5:43 a.m.

They smoke. They drink. They’re often obese.

Yet they don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, strokes or diabetes.

One of them did develop a ravaging case of ovarian cancer. But she got better.

A group of some 100 diminutive Ecuadorians, who cling in poverty to mountainside villages in the southern part of that Central American country, may be the most disease-free people on Earth.

And a new study says the protective genetic secret of this extended family holds hope of new treatments for many of the most common ailments of aging.

“Somehow, the chronic disease mode doesn’t seem to belong to this group at all,” says Valter Longo, one of the study’s senior authors. The results were released yesterday by the journal Science Translational Medicine.

“They just don’t get the illnesses we associate with aging,” says Longo, a University of Southern California cell biologist.

Born with a condition called Laron syndrome, many of the interrelated villagers stand shorter than four feet. Their stunted height proved key to the mystery of their extraordinarily hale health, he says.

Their small stature may also make them more susceptible to injuries, Longo adds.

He believes the apparent cancer protections found in the Laron villagers are related to the same anti-aging properties that the growth hormone defects bestow.

Longo says drugs that can block the normal GHR gene functions in people who have already attained full growth could offer protections for a wide range of ailments.

“For the first time we have real evidence that these anti-aging (growth hormone) strategies may work (with) on intervention for multiple diseases,” he says.

Indeed, he says, a drug currently approved and used to treat people with a rare, hyper growth syndrome already does just that.

http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/local/article/775861–ecuadorian-clan-ecuadorian-clan-key-to-longevity-report