Vegetarian diets, circulating miRNA expression and healthspan in subjects living in the Blue Zone

Tiantian Liu; Nicole M Gatto; Zhong Chen; Hongyu Qiu; Grace Lee; Penelope Duerksen-Hughes; Gary Fraser; Charles Wang

doi:10.1093/pcmedi/pbaa037

Vegetarian diets, circulating miRNA expression and healthspan in subjects living in the Blue Zone

Precis Clin Med. 2020 Dec;3(4):245-259. doi: 10.1093/pcmedi/pbaa037. Epub 2020 Oct 23.

Authors

Tiantian Liu¹, Nicole M Gatto², Zhong Chen¹, Hongyu Qiu³, Grace Lee⁴, Penelope Duerksen-Hughes⁵, Gary Fraser⁶, Charles Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ Center for Genomics, School of Medicine, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350, USA.
² School of Community and Global Health, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711, USA.
³ Center of Molecular and Translational Medicine, Institution of Biomedical Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, School of Behavioral Health, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350, USA.
⁵ Department of Basic Sciences, School of Medicine, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350, USA.
⁶ School of Public Health, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350, USA.

Abstract

A long-term vegetarian diet plays a role in the longevity and maintenance of the healthspan, but the underlying mechanisms for these observations are largely unknown. Particularly, it is not known whether a long-term vegetarian dietary pattern may affect the circulating miRNA expression in such a way as to modulate the healthspan. The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) cohort includes a large number of older adults who primarily follow vegetarian dietary patterns and reside in Loma Linda, California, one of five "Blue Zones" in the world in which a higher proportion of the population enjoys a longer than average lifespan. We performed miRNA-seq in 96 subjects selected from the AHS-2 cohort with different dietary patterns. We identified several differentially expressed miRNAs between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which are involved in immune response and cytokine signaling, cell growth and proliferation as well as age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative diseases. Overall, our study showed that a vegetarian diet modulates aging-associated circulating miRNAs in a sex-dependent manner of differential expression for certain miRNAs, which may be related in a beneficial manner to the healthspan. Further investigation is needed to validate these miRNAs as potential biomarkers for diet-modulated longevity in humans.

Keywords: Blue Zone; aging; circulating miRNA; miRNA sequencing; vegetarian diet.

Abstract

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