Ghrelin Alleviates Aging‐Related Cognitive Impairment by Regulating Autophagy‐Related Signaling via the SHBG/JNK1/Beclin1 Axis in Microglia
Lixing Zhou, Ying Cheng, Wanyu Zhao, Xuelian Sun, Fengjuan Hu, Meiling Ge, Yan Zhang, Gongchang Zhang, Birong Dong, Xiaolei Liu · 2026
Read Ghrelin Alleviates Aging‐Related Cognitive Impairment by Regulating Autophagy‐Related Signaling via the SHBG/JNK1/Beclin1 Axis in Microglia by Lixing Zhou, Ying Cheng, Wanyu Zhao, Xuelian Sun, Fengjuan Hu, Meiling Ge, Yan Zhang, Gongchang Zhang, Birong Dong, Xiaolei Liu (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13621234.txt.
Description
Lixing Zhou and nine colleagues studied ghrelin, the hunger hormone, as an unlikely defender of the aging brain. Their work links three threads that rise together with age: fading thinking, tired immune cells in the brain called microglia, and a breakdown of autophagy, the cells' recycling system. Human data flagged ghrelin as the metabolic factor tied most strongly to cognitive impairment.
Aged mice and mice aged artificially with a sugar treatment showed the same pattern, with raised ghrelin already present. Giving ghrelin improved the animals' thinking, calmed microglial aging and inflammation, and restarted recycling markers, though high doses dulled its own receptor. Experiments in cells traced the effect through a chain involving a hormone-carrying protein, a stress enzyme, and a recycling starter protein. Blocking links in that chain erased the benefit, while boosting the last link restored it. The authors propose the pathway as a drug target.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lixing Zhou, Ying Cheng, Wanyu Zhao, Xuelian Sun, Fengjuan Hu, Meiling Ge, Yan Zhang, Gongchang Zhang, Birong Dong, Xiaolei Liu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 51 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |