New in @sciencemagazine we report a role of taurine deficiency as a driver of aging. I thank all the collaborators and funders as well as my present and past institutions in USA, UK and India for supporting my team.

#Taurine as a potential #prophylactic or #therapeutic agent to reduce symptomatic #malaria.

#Nonuniversality of #inflammaging across #human populations. Wonderful work from Alan Cohen @ColumbiaAging

Long road from #animal research to #humans. #Taurine was first noted as beneficial for stroke and #cardiovascular diseases prevention in stroke-prone spontaneously #hypertensiverats. Okamoto K et al., Jpn Circ J. 1963, 27: 282-293. For further read:

#Taurine ameliorates #blood pressure and #vascular function in patients with type 2 #diabetes: Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

For further read please see:

Nice to see some media outlets stay with available scientific evidences when writing news articles.

Wonderful work @NicholasRattray.

For further details see:

These results are consistent with taurine's role in senescence. We showed that taurine deficiency increases, and taurine supplementation in aged mice decreases, abundance of senescent cells. Taurine reduced accumulation of senescent cells in telomerase deficient zebra fishes.

Low intracellular levels of #taurine is a common metabolic feature of several #senescence induction conditions (#Etoposide, #irradiation, #cell passage, #hydroxyurea)—Can it be a new marker for senscence? is taurine a #senolytic, #senomorphic or both?

#Aging leads to depletion of #taurine in the mouse somatosensory cortex and taurine supplementation mitigates aging-related plasticity #decline.

Tissue depletion of #taurine accelerates skeletal muscle #senescence and leads to early death in mice.

Structural basis of #taurine regulation of #aging hallmarks and cellular #senescence through its transporter. This work offers new avenues for developing #interventions to combat cellular aging.

RT @NewsfromScience: With research papers becoming increasingly free to read and use, understanding #OpenAccess licenses is key. https://t.….

However, taurine blood levels are highly variable in adults and thus at the present time taurine cannot be used a biomarker to predict health or aging.

In summary, taurine deficiency accelerates the pace of aging because if you supplement animals (worms, mice, monkeys) they live longer and healthier, and conversely if you make animals taurine-deficient they have poor health and have 40% shorter lifespan.

We have just included the last participant and expect that we will have all the samples by the end of 2025 with analysis thereafter. This trial will hopefully generate sufficiently robust evidence to answer the question whether taurine supplementation slows human aging.

Next step of this research is us, humans. We are part of a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial to find out how half a year of daily taurine supplementation affects the estimated biological age, organ ages as well as health variables when compared to placebo.

Others and we have shown that taurine deficiency in animals results in significant health problems whereas increasing taurine through a pill improves health parameters and increases health and lifespan in animal models. Together this suggests that taurine deficiency is a problem.

This was first demonstrated by two papers in Science in 1975 and 1987 that showed that taurine deficiency causes blindness and heart failure in cats and dogs.