How the discovery of Klotho could increase your intelligence and longevity

Imagine a drug that not only prevents debilitating brain diseases like Alzheimer’s but also makes you much smarter, boosting your IQ by as much as three to six percent.

But that’s just the beginning. It could also regenerate your muscles, lower your risk of heart disease, and significantly increase your lifespan by enhancing your antioxidant balance.

Although these benefits might sound like a wonder drug used by superheroes in a Marvel action-adventure movie, it’s the stuff of real science, not science fiction.

Cardiologist Dr. Makoto Kuro-o accidentally stumbled upon a hormone that delivered these superpowers when researching the genetics of mice.

In 1991, Dr. Kuro-o was studying high blood pressure. After inserting DNA into mouse embryos to replicate the conditions of high blood pressure, he discovered that his mice died within two months. The normal expected lifespan of mice is two years!

Suspecting he had inadvertently switched off a hormone-generating gene critical for longevity, he conducted an autopsy. It revealed something startling: the rodents’ atrophied muscles and brittle bones suggested they had experienced accelerated aging.

Now embarking on a new scientific quest, he searched for the missing hormone.

Years later, he found it, and named it “Klotho.”

In Greek mythology, Klotho was one of the fates responsible for longevity. Her job was to spin each person’s thread of life.

Over the next few years, he and his colleagues discovered many other things about Klotho. For instance, they found it in a few organs, including the brain. The scientists noticed that mice who did not have enough of it in their brains suffered rapid cognitive decline.

Based on these discoveries, Dr. Kuro-o created an experiment to increase longevity in mice. Now instead of mice dying of premature old age because of insufficient Klotho, mice bred to produce extra Klotho started to live longer.

In 2011, Dr. Dena Dubal picked up his line of inquiry. An assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, she set up a laboratory to study Klotho.

She hypothesized that mice who produced extra Klotho lived 30 percent longer because their brains stayed healthy as they age. If Klotho could ward off Alzheimer’s and dementia in mice, she asked, could it also increase their ability to learn and remember?

On Mice and Men

Although scientists discovered Klotho did amazing things for mice, they began to wonder if it could also supercharge human brains and help people live longer.

Dr. Dubal set out to find the answer.

According to an article on Klotho in YourDNA, “Dr. Dubal and her colleagues published a research paper strongly indicating that the Klotho hormone could help humans (not just mice) with Alzheimer’s disease, another degenerative brain, and neurological disorders and increased cognitive abilities.”

Over the years, scientists have discovered Klotho has a number of powerful benefits:

• It can enhance glucose, calcium, phosphate, and potassium balance.
• It can improve insulin signaling.
• It can produce healthy benefits like form new blood vessels (angiogenesis), differentiating cells (adipogenesis)di, and prevent free-radical damage (anti-oxidation).

Enhancing Your Levels of Klotho

You can increase your levels of Klotho through exercise. Exercising over a period of 16 weeks will increase Klotho, with younger people showing a higher level of increase.

You can also prevent the decrease of Klotho by reducing psychological stress. In studies, women under chronic high stress had lower levels of Klotho than women in control groups.

Scientists now have a considerable body of research to draw upon to understand this almost magical hormone. In the future, you may be able to buy a drug with Klotho as an active ingredient, a health supplement that will make you smarter and live longer.