Naked Mole Rats Are Not Affected by Aging, New Study Reveals

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Despite them looking like the offspring of a drunken Nosferatu, the naked mole rats have managed to surprise the scientific community with each occasion. A new study featuring the wrinkly rodents have revealed that they do not age like other mammalian species and that their chances of death don’t increase with age.

Naked Mole Rats Don’t Know the Meaning of Growing Old

Although far from being immortal, the naked more rats do display an unusual quality – they hardly feel all the ‘wonderful’ things that come with old age. According to a new study from Calico, Google’s anti-aging institute, as they get older, the naked mole rat’s chance of planting daisies doesn’t increase, as in the case of other mammals.

If you think that this quality in naked mole rats is amazing, think again. Previous studies have revealed that these desert dwellers are immune to all forms of cancer and, as a plus, they can live deprived of oxygen for approximately 20 minutes.

Rochelle Buffenstein, the senior researcher of the project, has spent the past 30 years studying these rather ugly rodents. Buffenstein, who is a biogerontologist with the University of South California, declared that not a day goes by without discovering something amazing about these wrinkly desert rats.

After analyzing the medical records of over 3,200 naked mole rats, Buffenstein and her colleagues discovered that older rodents have basically the same chances of dying as rats who have reached sexual maturity.

According to the numbers, the mortality remains constant at 1 in 10,000 for the rest of their lives. What it all boils down to is that these desert rodents could very well be key to a longer and healthier life.

Buffenstein’s study was recently published in the online journal eLife.

Image source: Wikipedia