Valencia et al. paper describing “How aging increases susceptibility to develop cardiac hypertrophy following high sugar consumption”, published in Nutrients December 2022. Aging and poor nutrition are risk factors for heart disease, and pathological cardiac hypertrophy can lead to heart failure. High sugar consumption is associated with cardiovascular mortality, but few studies have investigated how high sugar diets impact the aging heart. Mitochondrial dysfunction with age may be associated with increased risk to nutritional stressors, and mitochondrial-targeted synthetic peptide, Elamipretide (ELAM), has been shown to prevent age-associated cardiac pathology in mice.

This study was designed to study age-differences in the response to a high sugar diet, and to interrogate whether this effect is mediated by mitochondrial dysfunction by treating mice with ELAM. Younger and older adult mice were treated with ELAM or saline for 2 weeks, and then provided either chow or high sucrose diet (60% calories from sucrose) for one week. We found that in older mice, cardiac hypertrophy accelerated after just one week of consuming a high sugar diet, while older mice treated with ELAM and younger mice were protected.