Gross ways to live long: Parasitic worms as an anti-inflammaging therapy?
- Institute of Healthy Ageing, and Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, United Kingdom
Figures
Figure 1
Helminth therapy to prevent Darwinian diseases of inflammatory hyperactivity.
(a) Resistance is futile: the filarial nematode Wuchereria bancrofti (top) that causes elephantiasis in individuals with a hyperactive response to the parasite (bottom). (b) The whipworm Trichuris suis, a candidate for use in helminth therapy. (c) The rodent filarial worm Acanthocheilonema viteae secretes a glycoprotein, ES-62, which is protective in murine models of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and atherosclerosis. In addition, in a mouse model of high-calorie diet-accelerated aging, ES-62 administration prevented age-associated increases in gut permeability and adiposity, and increased longevity (Crowe et al., 2020).
© 2015, Pandey et al. Figure 1a (top) is reproduced from Pandey et al., 2015. Published under a CC BY NC 4.0 license.
© 2019, Cheena Kapoor. Figure 1a (bottom) reproduced with permission from the copyright holder, Cheena Kapoor. This image is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence and further reproduction of this panel would require permission from the copyright holder.
© 2013, Friederike Ebner. Figure 1b was reproduced with permission from the copyright holder, Friederike Ebner, Institute of Immunology (Freie Universität Berlin). This image is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence and further reproduction of this panel would require permission from the copyright holder.
Figure 2
Helminth therapy and inflammaging.
(a) Inflammatory disorders throughout the life course may be classed as early-, mid-, and late-onset disorders. Pre-aging inflammation (e.g. allergic and autoimmune inflammation) contributes to early- and some mid-onset disorders (all of which may persist into later life), while inflammaging appears later in life and contributes to late- and some mid-onset disorders. Helminth therapy has been demonstrated to protect against early- and mid-onset disorders by controlling pre-aging inflammation, but whether it can also protect against mid- and late-onset disorders through anti-inflammaging mechanisms remains uncertain. We note that MS (age of onset 20–50 years) and lupus (15–45 years) are sometimes described as inflammaging related (Sanai et al., 2016; Musella et al., 2018; Tsai et al., 2019). (b) Hypothetical scheme of helminth-mediated attenuation of inflammaging acting at different pathophysiological stages. ‘Sources of inflammaging’ are the mechanisms by which new inflammation is introduced; ‘mediators of inflammaging’ are the components of existing inflammation itself; ‘targets of inflammaging’ are the tissues damaged by the inflammation. Helminth therapy could in principle target the inflammatory source and/or mediator and/or the damaged tissues.
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Gross ways to live long: Parasitic worms as an anti-inflammaging therapy?
eLife 10:e65180.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65180
