OK, weirdly enough we’re going to have two posts inside of a week on the subject of taurine. That’s because a new paper has come out that directly challenges some earlier results that decreasing taurine levels might be a marker of aging and that taurine supplementation itself was beneficial in older organisms.
The new work has used several longitudinal databases (i.e. ones where samples are collected over and over from the same subjects over time): the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) for human data, the Study of Longitudinal Aging in Mice (SLAM) and another collection of rhesus monkey blood samples collected over multiple years. These are valuable sets of data indeed, and this present work illustrates exactly why. And let me say right here that both BLSA and SLAM have been run with a good deal of NIH funding over the years and are exactly the sort of scientific public good that the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts will destroy for no good reason. They are already putting pressure on them: the BLSA site has an infuriating banner at the top of its page saying “This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives”. What those might be, God only knows. My apologies for dropping this message in here, but these are pretty horrible times.
With that vital point made, what these authors have done is use these samples to see if taurine really does decline with age, and in the most direct way possible. Previous work in the area (as with all non-longitudinal aging studies) is vulnerable to errors from disparate samples from different populations collected by varying methods, and sometimes from pooling of samples as well. The gold standard is to have a large collection of study subjects who are all sampled individually over a good portion of their lifespan, and needless to say there aren’t too many of those data sets around.
And in examining these, the taurine/age correlation disappears. It disappears in all three species, in male and female subjects alike. Taurine concentration does not decrease with age, and any age-related differences are in fact swamped by far greater variability from individual to individual. You can see why longitudinal samples are the acid test for this sort of thing! Put together, it would seem that taurine is useless as a marker of aging, and there is no reason a priori to expect that supplementation with it would improve anything in older animals and humans. Note that this does not mean that it doesn’t improve things - that’s still an open question - but if it does, that result seems to have been arrived at by chance.
And if it does improve anything, that might be just One Of Those Things in a single person. As the authors put it: “Our results suggest that changes in circulating taurine are not a universal feature of aging and that its pleiotropic effects may be dependent on the temporal and physiological context of each individual”. In other words, it might as well not be a real effect at all for all the broad applicability it has, and there is no reason to expect that taurine will do any specific person any actual good.
Let me also note that this is why in that 2023 post linked above I mentioned that I was not going to just start taking taurine (even though I am, somehow, 63 at this point). Results have to be checked, and the most interesting and useful they are the more important that checking is. We have also just found that that taurine might well be important in the development of some types of leukemia, and I would like to see a good deal more work on that subject before drawing a conclusion on it as well. But taken together, all of this new information makes me glad that I have not been loading up on the taurine for purposes of graceful aging, I can tell you that for sure.