Reporting on a Nine Month Self-Experiment in Taurine Supplementation

Today's post is a report from the community on the impact of taurine supplementation on a few biomarkers of interest. Taurine is a dietary amino acid, and circulating levels of taurine influence any number of biological processes. Taurine levels decrease with age in a variety of species; in humans circulating taurine is halved by age 50. You might recall that supplementation with taurine was demonstrated to modestly extend life in mice and improve health in old non-human primates. This may be largely due to enhanced performance of the antioxidant glutathione, and you might recall that other approaches to upregulation of glutathione activity have been shown to produce benefits in old humans, dampening oxidative stress and associated inflammation.

A few human clinical trials of taurine supplementation have been conducted, but the results are not all that conclusive, other than to demonstrate that this form of intervention is very safe. So why not give it a try, and see what results? If you look back in the Fight Aging! archives, you'll find an outline for a self-experiment with taurine supplementation. Taurine is cheap and readily available as as a supplement, and inexpensive blood tests can be used to assess outcomes. Here, the self-experimenter chose to focus on phenotypic age and the biomarkers used to construct this assessment of phenotypic age. Only one marker of oxidative stress was used, an assessment of circulating oxidized LDL particles.

The self-experimenter was a vegetarian in his 50s.
3 grams per day of taurine was taken orally for 9 months.
Diet and lifestyle was kept consistent, as much as possible in a busy life.

Phenotypic age acceleration: -9.00 to -10.85 years
Albumin: 4.1 to 4.3 g/dL (reference range is 3.6-5.1 g/dL)
Creatine: 0.72 to 0.65 mg/dL (desired range is 0.70-1.30 mg/dL)
Fasting Glucose: 93 to 90 mg/dL (desired range: 65-99 mg/dL)
C-Reactive Protein: 0.30 to 0.34 mg/L (considered low risk under 1.00 mg/L)
Alkaline Phosphatase (ALP) 53 to 50 U/L (reference range is 35-144 U/L)
Lymphocyte Percentage 33.1% to 40.7% (normal range is 20% to 40%)
Mean Cell Volume (MCV): 87.8 to 88.6 fL (desired range is 80.0-100.0 fL)
Red Cell Dist Width (RDW): 13.3% to 13.5% (desired range is 11.0-15.0%)
White Blood Cells (WBC): 4.8 to 3.9 Thousand/uL (reference range is 3.8-10.8 Thousand/uL)

Taurine: 43.6 to 114.9 umol/L (reference range is 29.2-132.3 umol/L)
Oxidized LDL: 105 to 82 ng/mL (reference range is 10-170 ng/mL)
LDL and HDL cholesterol levels were largely unchanged.
Absolute Lymphocytes: 1589 to 1587 cells/uL (desired range is 850-3900 cells/uL)
Absolute Monocytes: 312 to 269 cells/uL (desired range is 200-950 cells/uL)
Absolute Neutrophils: 2832 to 1981 cells/uL (desired range is 1500-7800 cells/uL)
Lymphocyte: Monocyte Ratio: 5.1 to 5.9
Other complete blood count statistics were largely unchanged.

Going from the data provided, the supplementation successfully increased a low circulating taurine level to a high circulating taurine level as intended, and modestly reduced phenotypic age. The most interesting change seen in the biomarkers making up the phenotypic age metric is the increased lymphocyte percentage. This change was entirely due to the absolute neutrophil count decreasing from 2832 to 1981 cells/uL, while other absolute counts for white blood cell types remained much the same. Neutrophil counts can be raised temporarily by transient infection or inflammation, but per the self-experimenter, ~2800 had been a fairly consistent level for absolute neutrophil count for some years prior to this self-experiment. The observed reduction is thus a novel change, and likely due to the taurine supplementation.

A second interesting point is the reduction in oxidized LDL, a marker of oxidative stress and also a contributing factor in the development of atherosclerosis. As a sidebar, also note the low creatine levels, characteristic of vegetarians since dietary creatine is mostly found in meat.

The modestly favorable results shown here form only a single data point and should be taken as an anecdote, of course. It would be interesting to see the results of a few hundred participant clinical trial of taurine supplementation that focused on the various modern approaches to measuring biological age, such as epigenetic clocks. One shouldn't expect there to be a rush to do this, however. Trials are expensive, and there is little spare funding to be found in the business of selling well-established supplement compounds. At the end of the day modest effect sizes are modest effect sizes, and we'd like to focus on better approaches to the problem of aging - but if the intervention is both very cheap and very safe, then it may well be worth the effort to further establish the degree to which it can be useful.