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A team of scientists led by Duke-NUS Medical School have identified an important pathway that gets disrupted in the advanced form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)—and intervening with a naturally-occurring compound known as spermidine partially fixes the problem. "Currently, there is no pharmacological therapy for NASH, with several drugs showing only limited efficacy in clinical trials, so there is an urgent need to better understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie it," said the study's first author Dr. Zhou Jin. Dr. Zhou, senior author Professor Paul Michael Yen from the CVMD Program, and their colleagues in...

A recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine reported that eating cheese — specifically the aged kind containing the compound spermidine, as found in blue cheese — was linked to a longer life in mammals when tested on mice. “The mice do not only live longer when we supplement spermidine to the drinking water, but they are also healthier in terms of cardiac function,” Frank Madeo, co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Graz in Austria, told Medical Daily.

Scientists have shown that feeding a simple polyamine called spermidine to worms, fruit flies and yeast significantly prolongs their lifespan. In addition, adding spermidine to the diet of mice decreased molecular markers of ageing, and when human immune cells were cultured in a medium containing spermidine, they also lived for longer.Spermidine - a simple linear molecule found in large quantities in human sperm and grapefruit - is known to be necessary for cell growth and maturation, and as cells age their level of spermidine is know to fall. Now, Frank Madeo from the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues have shown...