More On Resveratrol In Mice
In the Pipeline looks at recent results for the calorie restriction mimetic resveratrol in mice: "Because most age-related diseases are likely to be secondary to the aging process itself, the discovery of such compounds could have a profound public health impact by reducing disease incidence and possibly extending the quality and length of the human lifespan. ... That's a fine list of things that everyone would like to avoid: cancer, decline, and death. And the last sentence makes a key point, that the age-related diseases are not inevitable, but can be attacked as a group by attacking aging itself. A few years back, that statement might not have made it into a scientific paper at this level, but it can now. ... So resveratrol appears to be a pretty close mimic of caloric restriction - but it's closest in the non-age-related genes, which is interesting. The thing is, there's no guarantee that all these transcriptional changes are good - presumably a lot of the ones that reverse age-related changes are beneficial (although we don't know that for sure), but the ones that aren't involved in aging could be more of a mixed bag. ... this is a very interesting study, and a very hopeful one, but it also points out just how much we don't know."
Link: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/06/resveratrol_in_mice.php