NMN---Is It the “The Fountain of Youth” We Are Looking For?
In Ancient China, one of the well-known stories should be that, in 219 BC, the Chinese 1st emperor, Qin Shi Huang, sent his subordinate, Xu Fu, with 3000 young girls and boys to look for the immortal medicine for him in Penglai island located in East China Sea, but it ended up that Mr Xu didn’t find the wonder medicine and fled to an island we now call Japan to avoid being killed by Qin Shi Huang.
For several hundreds of years, the above healthcare systems seem working very well and no one have little doubt about it. However, during the past two decades, there are quite a number scholars around the world who are thinking a different way to deal with human being’s health, particularly aging and death. They are looking into whether we can find some ways to live a healthy and happy life with less or no age-related diseases till the end, or, even better, extended our lifespan. Some of the scholars are from prestigious academic institutes such as MIT, Harvard University, University of Washington at Saint Louis, Oxford University, and Cambridge University. At the full front of these scholars are Professors Leonard Guarente of MIT, David Sinclair of Harvard, Shin-ichiro Imai of Washington University at Saint Louis, and Charles Brenner of University of Iowa. These scholars believe in that, with the advances of modern biological studies, especially our better understanding of cell, molecular biology, and human genome in our body, we should be able to figure out why we are aging, to find ways to live a healthy life, and even to extend our lifespan, instead of passively waiting for diseases to come and then go to see doctors for a prescription of a certain medicines. This sounds like we are close to find the real “Youth of Fountain”.
These prominent scientists, instead of making molecules in the lab to interfere the activities of disease-causing biological targets as most current biopharmaceutical companies are doing, look at the many internal biological pathways of human body to identify those that affect human aging the most, and then find those key molecules that already exist in our human body and have critical impact on those aging related biological pathways. After many years of searching, Professors Guarente, Kennedy, Sinclair, Imai, Brenner, and many other scholars identified NAD+ as one of the key molecules in our human body that played a critical role on our aging and the many aging related health. These scholars concluded that the key to aging is that the cells of various tissues in our body lost functioning caused by epigenetic changes in the cell nuclei. Epigenome can be simply defined as the environments that impact genes’ function in cell nuclei. They further found NAD+ is involving in many critical biological activities in cells that impact epigenetic changes, such as being major cell energy source and playing key roles for damaged DNA repair. But its content decreases quickly when people aging.
They believe the lower content of NAD+ is one of the major keys why people are aging!
NAD+ was first discovered in 1906. After over 100 years of studies, scientists now have a very good understanding of its biological activities in our human bodies and its corresponding functions to human health. A summary of NAD+ is shown below:
Will the excellent healthy longevity efficacy observed on animals repeats on human beings? So far only a handful human clinical studies on NMN were done. The results were summarized in below tables. From these published results, we can see a mixed bag of we had hope for. Some of these studies failed to observe the elevation of human tissue NAD+ levels while a few others reported significantly increases of NAD+ concentrations by NMN supplementation. Some studies even saw beneficial human healthy longevity effects, such as improving physical strength, increasing muscle insulin sensitivity, etc. Our own human clinical study published on GeroScience revealed that our AbinoNutra®️NMN can elevate blood NAD+ concentration 1.5-4.7 fold after daily oral administration of 300mg, 600mg, or 900mg NMN for 30-60 days and significantly improves physical strength, biological age and overall health of healthy mid-aged adults. Our study also revealed 600mg oral daily dose give the optimum results. Finally, so far, all human clinical studies confirmed that NMN is safe and well-tolerated at as high as 2 grams daily oral intake.
All in all, based on above discussion, NMN is a natural product that exist in several vegetables in low quantity and also in all cells of human body. It is a key precursor of Coenzyme I (NAD+). Within short time after animals take NMN orally, the NAD+ level in the cells of various tissues increases dramatically. NMN has been clinically proven to be safe in human for up to 500mg. Many prominent scientists in the world have conducted extensive studies on the possibility of reversing aging and discovered NAD+ plays a key role in the aging process. NAD+ level decreases with aging. It has been confirmed that increasing the level of NAD+ in aged animals can reverse the aging and relieve many age-related diseases. NMN supplement is a safe and efficient way to help increase the NAD+ level of our bodies.