Cut calories, increase egg quality
A strategy that has been shown to reduce age-related health problems in several animal studies may also combat a major cause of age-associated infertility and birth defects. Investigators from Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have shown that restricting the caloric intake of adult female mice prevents a spectrum of abnormalities, such as extra or missing copies of chromosomes that arise more frequently in egg cells of aging female mammals. Their report appears in this week’s online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. “We found that we could completely prevent, in a mouse model, essentially every aspect of the declining egg quality typical of older females,” says Jonathan Tilly, director of the Vincent Center for Reproductive Biology in the MGH Vincent Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, who led the study. “We also identified a gene that can be manipulated to reproduce the effects of dietary caloric restriction...