In brief
NAD⁺ is a coenzyme for redox reactions and so sits at the centre of energy metabolism, but it is also consumed by enzymes that do not use it for redox chemistry: the sirtuins, CD38 and the poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases. Through those it touches metabolic pathways, DNA repair, chromatin remodelling, cellular senescence and immune-cell function. The review lays out the evidence that tissue NAD⁺ falls with age in several organisms including rodents and humans, that the fall is linked to age-associated conditions including cognitive decline, cancer, metabolic disease, sarcopenia and frailty, and that restoring NAD⁺ slows or reverses many of them in models. It closes with what is not known: how NAD⁺ levels are regulated, how best to restore them, whether that is safe, and whether it helps ageing humans.
Study design
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology overview of NAD⁺ metabolism in ageing.
What it does not show
A review that is itself careful to separate model-organism results from human ones. Its open questions are the honest state of the field.
A review summarises other papers and inherits every limit of the work it cites. It adds no new experiment, and where a review is written by the group that developed the compound, the selection of what to include is theirs.
Where this paper is cited
- NAD+ — Review of NAD+ metabolism in ageing: the enzymes that consume it, why levels fall, and the interventions studied.
Other papers cited for NAD+
- Review NAD+ Intermediates: The Biology and Therapeutic Potential of NMN and NR Yoshino et al. (2018), Cell Metab
- Review Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence Rajman et al. (2018), Cell Metab
Further reading
- Research library: every paper cited on this site, by compound and by study type.
- Cognitive and longevity peptide comparison
- How to read a certificate of analysis
- Lyophilised peptide storage and stability
How this page was made: the citation was retrieved from PubMed by PMID and checked against the title on the product page; the summary was written from the paper's abstract and reports only what the abstract reports. Read the paper itself before relying on any figure here.