TY - JOUR
T1 - Vegetarian diets, circulating miRNA expression and healthspan in subjects living in the Blue Zone
AU - Liu, Tiantian
AU - Gatto, Nicole M.
AU - Chen, Zhong
AU - Qiu, Hongyu
AU - Lee, Grace
AU - Duerksen-Hughes, Penelope
AU - Fraser, Gary
AU - Wang, Charles
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf West China School of Medicine & West China Hospital of Sichuan University. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - A long-term vegetarian diet plays a role in the longevity and maintenance of the healthspan, but the underlying mechanisms for these observations are largely unknown. Particularly, it is not known whether a long-term vegetarian dietary pattern may affect the circulating miRNA expression in such a way as to modulate the healthspan. The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) cohort includes a large number of older adults who primarily follow vegetarian dietary patterns and reside in Loma Linda, California, one of five “Blue Zones” in the world in which a higher proportion of the population enjoys a longer than average lifespan. We performed miRNA-seq in 96 subjects selected from the AHS-2 cohort with different dietary patterns. We identified several differentially expressed miRNAs between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which are involved in immune response and cytokine signaling, cell growth and proliferation as well as age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative diseases. Overall, our study showed that a vegetarian diet modulates aging-associated circulating miRNAs in a sex-dependent manner of differential expression for certain miRNAs, which may be related in a beneficial manner to the healthspan. Further investigation is needed to validate these miRNAs as potential biomarkers for diet-modulated longevity in humans.
AB - A long-term vegetarian diet plays a role in the longevity and maintenance of the healthspan, but the underlying mechanisms for these observations are largely unknown. Particularly, it is not known whether a long-term vegetarian dietary pattern may affect the circulating miRNA expression in such a way as to modulate the healthspan. The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) cohort includes a large number of older adults who primarily follow vegetarian dietary patterns and reside in Loma Linda, California, one of five “Blue Zones” in the world in which a higher proportion of the population enjoys a longer than average lifespan. We performed miRNA-seq in 96 subjects selected from the AHS-2 cohort with different dietary patterns. We identified several differentially expressed miRNAs between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which are involved in immune response and cytokine signaling, cell growth and proliferation as well as age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative diseases. Overall, our study showed that a vegetarian diet modulates aging-associated circulating miRNAs in a sex-dependent manner of differential expression for certain miRNAs, which may be related in a beneficial manner to the healthspan. Further investigation is needed to validate these miRNAs as potential biomarkers for diet-modulated longevity in humans.
KW - Aging
KW - Blue Zone
KW - Circulating miRNA
KW - MiRNA sequencing
KW - Vegetarian diet
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U2 - 10.1093/PCMEDI/PBAA037
DO - 10.1093/PCMEDI/PBAA037
M3 - Article
C2 - 33391847
SN - 2096-5303
VL - 3
SP - 245
EP - 259
JO - Precision Clinical Medicine
JF - Precision Clinical Medicine
IS - 4
ER -