Many MindedYale team finds taurine acts as a brake on immune inflammation in aging
A Yale School of Medicine study published in Cell looked at how taurine relates to the inflammation that comes with aging. The senior author is Vishwa Deep Dixit, who directs the Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age). The open question was whether taurine is a driver or a passenger in the benefits of calorie restriction. People who restricted calories for up to 12 months had higher taurine levels than people not dieting.
The team also compared blood serum from adults aged 20-40 with serum from adults aged 60-99. Taurine was higher in the older group, not lower as the researchers expected. They hypothesize the body makes more taurine with age to counter inflammation driven by a declining innate immune system.
In lab-grown macrophages exposed to threats such as bacterial toxins, the cells assembled NLRP3 inflammasome complexes and released up to 80% of their taurine. Adding taurine back blocked the downstream inflammation. Lowering taurine in the macrophages of mice increased NLRP3 inflammation, including in young mice. Dixit concludes that taurine works as a brake that keeps the inflammasome in check while still allowing immune sensing.
For health, the value is in the mechanism, not a new supplement. The article says eating more taurine (seafood, dark meat, seaweed) is unlikely to counter inflammaging, since taurine does not deplete with age. A possible future approach is getting aging macrophages to retain their taurine. That is a target, not a treatment, and it does not change what care costs today.
The caveats are large. The experiments used cultured cells and mice, and human evidence is limited to serum level comparisons. It is unclear why aging macrophages leak taurine or where it goes afterward, and the team plans to investigate. Dixit calls this a first step, and the article says taurine is not an anti-aging silver bullet.
Source: New Atlas