Healthy Aging Biology, Powerful Insight from the Long-Lived Naked Mole-Rat

The naked mole-rat, Heterocephalus glaber, is the longest-lived rodent known with a lifespan in captivity >30 years, 10 times longer than mice, a comparable size rodent. In addition to a particularly long life, it exhibits exceptional resistance to many age-related diseases: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and metabolic diseases. It resists many forms of stress: hypoxia, oxidative stress, and strikingly maintains adequate body composition, fertility, bone quality, and mineral density throughout their long life. The naked mole-rat is a non-traditional animal model that defies the law governing the processes of aging and mortality and provides a powerful tool for the discovery of endogenous molecular anti-aging pathways. Over the past decades, much possible resistance and anti-aging mechanisms have been discovered. These include exclusive physiological mechanisms involved in cellular senescence and its clearance, telomere attrition, genome and proteome stability, stress resistance and metabolism flexibility… This review aims to summarize the many identified anti-aging strategies of the naked mole-rat to better grasp some of the main theories that have been generated. However, many of these theories remain to be fully investigated and confirmed to further understand the complex biology of the naked mole-rat.