Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 3 pp 3798—3818
Deciphering the correlations between aging and constipation by metabolomics and network pharmacology
- 1 Modern Research Center for Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, Shanxi, China
- 2 Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, Shanxi, PR China
- 3 Department of Pharmacology, Shanxi Institute for Food and Drug Control, Taiyuan 030001, Shanxi, China
- 4 Singapore Phenome Center, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 999002, Singapore
Received: May 21, 2020 Accepted: November 13, 2020 Published: January 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202340How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
From the points of view of phenomena and experience, aging and constipation are inextricably correlated. However, experimental support and underlying mechanisms are still lacking. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships between aging and constipation from the perspectives of fecal metabolites and network pharmacology. The behavioral analyses of aging and constipation were carried out on both aging rats and constipation rats. We found that aging rats exhibited not only significant aging behaviors but also significant constipation behaviors, while constipation rats exhibited both significant constipation and aging behaviors. Additionally, fecal metabolomics was carried out and found that 23 metabolites were aging-related and 22 metabolites were constipation-related. Among them, there were 16 differential metabolites in common with 11 metabolic pathways. Network pharmacology was applied to construct the target-pathway network of aging and constipation, revealing that pathway in cancer was the most associated signaling pathway. The current findings will provide not only a novel perspective for understanding aging and constipation, but a theoretical association and understanding the traditional Chinese medicine theory and the Western medicine theory about aging and constipation, as well as support for the clinical research and development of medicine related to constipation in the elderly.