Klotho as a Housekeeper: How Does the Protein Contribute to Brain Reactivity? An Empirical Study from UCSF Neurology
The goddess of fate is called Klotho and she is said to have been responsible for spinning the thread of life. In the human body, a proteins that is similar to the one that is found in the brain could bring life back to it.
“Cognitive decline from aging is one of our most pressing biomedical problems without truly effective medicines,” says Dena Dubal, an associate professor of neurology at UCSF and the study’s senior author. After discovering—accidentally—in previous work that klotho boosts cognition in mice, she says, “it became important to test this in a brain like ours.”
Produced by the kidney, klotho circulates in the blood and has been linked to health and lifespan. The professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center describes it as a housekeeper that helps regulate the kidneys and metabolism. “It protects us and keeps us healthy,” he says.
People seem to have health benefits when they have more of theprotein. Although klotho levels naturally decrease with age, some people have more of it than others. In the paper, Dubal and her colleagues studied more than 700 people. Those with higher levels of the protein—about one in five people studied—performed better on thinking and memory tests, such as drawing a recalled image and naming the color of a word shown in a different color.
The mice that were engineered to have higher than usual levels of theProtein did better on maze tests than normal mice.
A neurologist at the UK Dementia Research Institute says that the parallels between humans and monkeys could mean that there is a need for treatments for human cognitive disorders.
At the University of California, San Francisco, co-author Dena Dubal compares the test to remembering where you left your car in a car park or a sequence of numbers after hearing it. These tasks become harder as you get older.
Low doses of klotho and its effect in monkey tests of glucose in rat foiled bovine chromosomes
The monkeys performed significantly better in these tests after receiving klotho — before the injections they identified the correct wells around 45% of the time, compared with around 60% of the time after injection. The improvement was sustained for at least two weeks. Unlike in previous studies involving mice, relatively low doses of klotho were effective. This adds an element of complexity to the findings, which suggests a more nuanced mode of actions than was previously thought, Busche says.