People with Laron syndrome, a deficiency in growth hormone, have a low risk of heart disease and other diseases associated with age, reveals a new study which suggests the possibility of strategies for new treatments.
A rare form of dwarfismwhich affects only 400–500 people worldwide has piqued the interest of scientists studying aging and metabolic diseases. This is because a number of studies have linked the disease to a series of positive health effects, including protection against diabetes, cancerIt is cognitive decline.
In experiments carried out with laboratory mice, those with a similar condition lived about 40% longer than their counterparts. control animals.
O new study published on the Med website shows that people with Laron syndrome have lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease – have lower blood pressure, reduced accumulation of arterial fat and a thinner carotid artery wall than those who do not have the syndrome.
“In a way, this was the most important of all the studies. It was the last missing piece to show that they appear to be protected from all major age-related diseases,” says study co-author Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California, cited by Nature.
From Ecuador to the world
The now published study is the latest result of a nearly 20-year international collaboration between Valter Longo, professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and endocrinologist Jaime Guevara-Aguirre from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador.
The study involved 24 people with Laron syndrome and 27 of their relatives, all from Ecuador, where about a third of all people with this disease in the world live, says Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, who has been following this group of people for more than 30 years, since a cluster of cases was identified in isolated locations in the Andes Mountains.
Researchers carried out a series of tests that showed that people with Laron syndrome had normal and even minor cardiovascular diseases compared to their family members without the disease. They also revealed that they had a low risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes, in addition to having better performance on cognition and memory tests.
