Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Women who are feeling depressed or chronically stressed have significantly lower levels of a hormone that regulates aging and enhances cognition, according to a new study published in the Tuesday edition of the journal Translational Psychiatry.
The study, which was led by experts at the University of California-San Francisco, compared women who had children with an autism spectrum disorder to a group of lower-stressed control subjects, and found that they had far lower levels of the longevity hormone, klotho.
Furthermore, the authors found that women with clinically significant depressive symptoms had even lower levels of klotho in their blood that those who were stressed but were not experiencing such symptoms. This is said to be the first study to show a link between psychological influences and the hormone, which is known to perform several functions in the human body.
“Our findings suggest that klotho, which we now know is very important to health, could be a link between chronic stress and premature disease and death,” explained Dr. Aric Prather, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF.
“Since our study is observational, we cannot say that chronic stress directly caused lower klotho levels,” he added, “but the new connection opens avenues of research that converge upon aging, mental health, and age-related diseases.”
Klotho-based therapy could ease the aging process
In previous work conducted using mice and worms, researchers have determined that when klotho production is disrupted, it promotes the symptoms of aging, including hardening of the arteries and the loss of muscle and bone. Conversely, when the abundance of the hormone is increased, the animals tended to live longer.
Senior author Dr. Dena Dubal previously demonstrated that one out of every five people has a genetic variant that has been associated with higher levels of klotho in the bloodstream, a larger region of the prefrontal cortex, and improved overall cognitive function. Carriers of this variant also tend to live longer and have lower rates of age-related disease.
Increasing klotho in mice boosted their cognition and increased their resilience to Alzheimer-related toxins, indicating that the hormone may have a therapeutic effect on the brain. To investigate further, they recruited 90 highly-stressed caregivers and 88 low-stress control subjects, most of whom were in their 30s and 40s and otherwise healthy.
While klotho levels are known to decline with age, this decline was only witnessed in the high-stress group in this study. There was no significant age-related reduction in klotho among the low-stress women, leading Dr. Prather’s team to hypothesize that lower levels of the hormone could contribute to stress and depression, since it acts on several neural pathways linked to both.
“Chronic stress transmits risk for bad health outcomes in aging, including cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Dubal, an assistant professor in the UCSF neurology department. “It will be important to figure out if higher levels of klotho can benefit mind and body health as we age. If so, therapeutics or lifestyle interventions that increase the longevity hormone could have a big impact on people’s lives.”
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