How a weird accident helps scientists to understand the process of aging
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In late October 1995, Botec, the leading pharmaceutical company in Turkey at the time, was trying to develop a drug against the Standripoline syndrome. Standripoline syndrome is a hereditary disease that causes children to start puberty much earlier, varying from less effected patients who develop their first noticeable symptoms at the age of ten, up to extreme cases like Ben McDonson, who reached biological adolescence by the time he was only five years old.
While it was clear that the changes were related to a unusual hormone levels, drugs that successfully regulate them for almost everybody have no effect on people who suffer from Standripoline syndrome. Botec experimented with adding AMH blockers to these drugs in order to stop an enzyme that was found to be far more active at patients of "early adults", as they are sometimes called. The tests were stopped in early 1996 after no significant effect could be verified, and the whole project has already become just another unsuccessfull try to develop a new medical, as they happen all the time.
However, in summer 2003, Aziz Kocao?lu, the director of an elementary school in Gölcük, a city near Istanbul, reported that the last years first graders seemed to behave significantly younger. After Hürriyet Daily News cited him in an article about school development, a number of other school directors and teachers in the area around Istanbul reported the same. "Not only that they behave unusual young", Yusuf Kaanli says, "they are even just not as tall as first graders usually are".
The reports seemed odd, but not much attention has been brought to it until recently. Scientists of Istanbul University claimed to find a significant strange behaviour of AMH related enzymes in people born between October 1995 and March 1996 in a wide area around Istanbul. After they looked up the literature on the AMH system, they stumbled upon Botecs research of that time. Indeed, extremely small traces of the AMH blockers Botec developed could still be found in 97 of the people born in that time - 22 years after the blockers were produced the last time.
After the connection to Botecs experiment was made, it was found that due to a factory accident, the medicals were leaked into the central water cleaning system of Istanbul. While children of the age of one and older are complete immune to its effects, babies have a more open ADD system in the first year, causing them to save the chemical deep inside their bones, where they stay for years.
"It seems, that the drug indeed prevents aging, but one a completely different scale than supposed", the scientists conclude. "We will investigate, if this causes harm to those who carry around small amounts of AMH blockers their whole life, but for now, even the opposite seems to be the case: the effected people are on perfect health, but still seem to age younger", Merlin Wummendibling says. "We estimate, that the effected people, who all turn 22 within the next months or just turned 22, have aged roughly a year less than other 22 year olds". An interesting observation of this case is, that not only their body aged slower, but also their personality: in a number of psychological tests, designed to estimate the age of people, their scores are distributed identically to people born in late 1996.
It is, of course, still a concern that other side effects might be more harmfull than a slow aging process, but it reveals interesting aspects about aging, that researches of many different universities are excited to evaluate.
Dies ist eine satirische Website. Nimm es nicht ernst Es ist ein Witz.