You might want to hold off on stockpiling taurine supplements as part of your anti-aging cocktail. Research published today failed to find evidence that our levels of taurine shrink as we get older, contrary to some earlier studies.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health led the research, published Thursday in Science. They analyzed long-running data from past human, mice, and monkey studies, finding that taurine levels didn’t change much over time and widely varied between individual animals. The results suggest that taurine isn’t a good marker for age and throw into doubt the idea that it can prolong healthy aging.
“Circulating taurine doesn’t decline with age in healthy individuals of these three mammalian species across the adult lifespan,” said lead study researcher Maria Emilia Fernandez, a postdoctoral fellow in the Translational Gerontology Branch of the NIH’s National Institute on Aging, in a press conference Tuesday announcing the findings.
Taurine is a semi-essential and important micronutrient. Our bodies naturally produce taurine, though it can also easily be found in animal products, supplements, and energy drinks (people once collected taurine from bulls, but it’s now produced synthetically). Taurine plays many roles in the body, such as helping us make bile acid and keeping our blood pressure stable. In recent years, some studies have indicated that taurine—or rather, the loss of taurine—might also be a key driver of our worsening health as we get older.
A 2023 study that looked at several different animal models, for instance, found that taurine levels circulating in the blood appeared to decline as the animals aged. When the researchers added taurine supplements to the animals’ diets, it appeared to slightly extend the lifespan of mice and worms in addition to improving the health of older monkeys. The study also found an association between lower taurine levels in humans and an increased risk of age-related diseases.
Though this wasn’t the first research to suggest taurine’s anti-aging potential, it certainly sparked people’s attention, including the authors behind this latest research. Not every bit of research on the topic has supported this link, however, and many studies have only analyzed taurine in people and animals at a single point in time or for a relatively brief period. The researchers behind the new study wanted to take a closer look at how these levels fluctuated over time across different species and in both males and females.
They turned to other existing studies or projects involving people, mice, and rhesus monkeys that had longitudinal data on taurine levels in the blood—meaning they could track these levels across the lifespan. Overall, they found that taurine levels didn’t decline in any of the animals or humans they studied; if anything, taurine levels usually increased over time in different groups (the sole exception being male mice). They also found that differences in taurine levels between individuals could sometimes vary significantly, and that these differences were usually larger than the changes seen over an animal’s lifetime.
In other words, there doesn’t appear to be much of a connection at all between taurine and aging, at least in this research. “On the basis of these findings, we conclude that low circulating taurine concentrations are unlikely to serve as a good biomarker of aging,” the researchers wrote.
These are still findings from a single study, so more research will be needed to settle the question. The results also don’t mean that taurine isn’t important to our health. And it is still possible that low taurine levels can contribute to chronic health problems, including conditions that become more common as we age. Likewise, there may be some older people with low taurine who would benefit from increasing their intake.
Vijay Yadav, one of the authors behind the 2023 study, and his colleagues are currently running a randomized clinical trial testing whether taurine supplements can improve the health and fitness of middle-aged adults. He expects the trial to conclude by the end of 2025, with analysis coming soon after. For now, though, Yadav isn’t saying that people should be downing taurine like it’s candy.
“We cannot really recommend any supplementation. We need to have a better understanding if it does or it does not [improve health]; that can only be addressed by a placebo controlled trial,” said Yadav in the same press conference Tuesday. “And of course there are a lot more questions that need to be addressed before you can really understand the biology to more depth of a particular molecule.”
While there are certainly things people can already do to stay healthier into their golden years, such as exercising regularly, the track record for anti-aging drugs or supplements overall remains spotty for the time being. And it seems that a universal fountain of youth—if we can ever truly find it—probably won’t contain any taurine.