News

The Wall Street Journal — Step Aside, Longevity Bros. It's Time for the Longevity Ladies
A growing group of female scientists, entrepreneurs and influencers is entering a longevity field long led by men. Women live about five years longer than men in the U.S., an advantage seen in every country with mortality data, yet they spend more of their later years in poor health. Dr. Dubal is quoted on this long-standing puzzle. Researchers see the study of ovaries, hormones and menopause as a way to unlock the biology of aging for both sexes.
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The New York Times — Women, Brains, Alzheimer's and Aging
Researchers found a gene in mice that appears to slow brain aging in females. In aging mice, the silenced second X chromosome partly “wakes up” in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. Dr. Dubal’s team boosted one awakened gene, Plp1, which helps build the myelin sheath around nerve cells. In old male mice, this restored memory and cognition, and in female mice it improved them further. The same gene exists in humans, which suggests a possible route to protecting the aging brain in both women and men.
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The New York Times — Longevity: Women Versus Men
Women outlive men worldwide, even during famines and epidemics, but they do not necessarily spend those extra years in good health. Scientists are working to understand why the sexes age differently, in the hope of extending lifespan and healthspan for everyone. Dr. Dubal describes her lab’s mouse research, in which animals with two X chromosomes lived longest, even when they had testes, which points to a protective effect of the second X chromosome.
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WIRED — One Shot of a Kidney Protein Gave Monkeys a Brain Boost
An early experiment in older rhesus macaques suggests that an injection of klotho improves working memory. Researchers at Yale and UCSF found that a single injection of the klotho protein led to modest improvements in cognitive function in older monkeys, and that the effects lasted for two weeks. Could it one day help people?
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The New York Times — One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It?
In 2011, Dr. Dena Dubal was hired by the University of California, San Francisco, as an assistant professor of neurology. She set up a new lab with one chief goal: to understand a mysterious hormone called Klotho. Dr. Dubal wondered if it might be the key to finding effective treatments for dementia and other disorders of the aging brain. At the time, scientists only knew enough about Klotho to be fascinated by it.
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NIH — A Boost to the Brain
Dr. Dena Dubal, University of California San Francisco, and Dr. Lennart Mucke, Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disorders, San Francisco.
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The Economist — The 3% Solution
Dr. Dubal and Dr. Lennart Mucke studied KL-VS, a version of the klotho gene linked to longevity, in 220 older adults, and compared their results with two other studies. People carrying KL-VS scored better on cognitive tests, a gap the article estimates at about six IQ points. Mice engineered to have more klotho learned and remembered better, with changes in the brain’s NMDA receptors. The authors suggest that a drug that raises klotho could one day enhance cognition.
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NPR — Anti-Aging Hormone Could Make You Smarter
Scientists have found that a hormone associated with long life also seems to make people smarter. The gene strengthens the connections between brain cells, a process that’s essential for learning. “We’ve discovered a way to potentially boost cognition,” says Dena Dubal, one of the study’s authors. That could mean “a very new way to treat diseases,” ranging from Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia, she says.
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