{"id":424740,"date":"2026-01-20T04:45:45","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T04:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/424740\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T04:45:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T04:45:45","slug":"ovaries-could-unlock-secrets-of-longevity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/424740\/","title":{"rendered":"Ovaries Could Unlock Secrets of Longevity"},"content":{"rendered":"

In cases where a woman\u2019s ovaries need to be removed entirely, her risk for chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease surpasses that of a post-menopausal woman, suggesting that even after the ovaries stop releasing eggs<\/a>, they still play a role in preserving overall health. <\/p>\n

By unraveling how ovaries function, scientists hope to better understand how they might promote health and also find ways to slow their aging. Doing that could potentially extend women\u2019s health spans\u2014the number of years they spend in good health\u2014and allow women to have children later if they so choose. Women suffering from other conditions linked to ovarian dysfunction, such as infertility and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS<\/a>), could also benefit, as could girls and women whose ovarian function becomes impaired before 40\u2014a condition known as primary ovarian insufficiency, which can be triggered by disease or treatments like chemotherapy. <\/p>\n

The ovaries, scientists have found, are among the fastest-aging organs in the human body. \u201cYou don\u2019t call a 40-year-old brain an aging brain, but for 40-year-old ovaries, they are already in the nursing home,\u201d says Yousin Suh, a reproductive-sciences professor at Columbia University. <\/p>\n

To understand why, Suh compared ovaries from women in their 20s and late 40s. \u201cI thought that maybe I would find some secret, something specific that was causing this rapid aging,\u201d Suh says. \u201cBut what I found blew my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ovaries, she discovered, were aging exactly like all the other organs in the body\u2014just at a much faster rate. \u201cThere was nothing special,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was the same mechanisms of aging that you see in other parts of the body: telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem-cell exhaustion. But happening in this much more compressed way. We had never seen anything like it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The discovery suggested something tantalizing: that the ovaries could offer a preview of how the entire body will age. Since the ovaries age in such a rapid way, they could also be used to more efficiently test anti-aging treatments. \u201cIt gave me hope that, my God, now we can really do intervention studies,\u201d says Suh, whose lab is leading a pilot study on whether rapamycin<\/a>, a drug that has in other experiments extended the life of animals, could slow ovarian aging in people. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In cases where a woman\u2019s ovaries need to be removed entirely, her risk for chronic conditions including cardiovascular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500,10485,5275,77479,77480],"class_list":["post-424740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-longevity","tag-magazine","tag-special-project","tag-sponsorshipblock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}