Preventive effects of red ginseng on an aging hallmark - senescence

Abstract

By 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years or older, increasing the importance of interventional therapies for age-associated diseases. Research investigating cultural dietary differences recognized that the use of herbal medicine supplementation such as processed Panax ginseng, referred to as red ginseng (RG), increases lifespan in Asian countries by facilitating healthy aging. However, the mechanism for how RG prevents, delays, or reverses aging-related diseases is unknown. Thus, this study assessed how RG facilitates healthy aging by identifying cellular and molecular mechanisms of hepatic senescence pathways in an aged mouse model.

Methods: This study compared three groups of wild-type (C57BL/6) mice: control young mice (3-month-old), control old mice (18-month-old which is equivalent to 60-year-old human beings), and RG-treated old mice (18-month-old). The RG-treated mice received 300 mg/kg body weight/day of RG via oral gavage injection for 4 weeks. To evaluate how RG delays hepatic cellular senescence, we analyzed the protein expression levels of the main senescence effectors (p53, p21, and p27) from liver tissue samples and primary hepatocytes.

Results: The aged mice treated with RG showed significantly reduced protein expression levels of cellular senescence markers p53/p21 in primary hepatocytes and p27 and p21 in liver samples compared to the control aged mice. This expression level is closer to the expression witnessed from the control young mice.

Conclusion: RG supplementation attenuates hepatic cellular senescence by downregulating p53/p21 and p27 pathways. Therefore, our results suggest that RG could be a novel interventional agent for delaying cellular senescence.

Relevance of Study: Our findings provide fundamental information that RG has the potential to be a widely used therapeutic agent to reduce the incidence of age-associated diseases.