Tickling Therapy? New therapy could slow the aging process

A new study from the University of Leeds suggests that tickling could be the key to slowing down aging.

This tickling is not the kind of tickling that causes spasmodic body movements and laughter. It's a different kind: tickle your ears.

The researchers "tickled" the participants' ears with a tiny electric current to influence the nervous system and slow down some of the effects of aging, the university announced in a statement released on Tuesday.

"It sounds like a strange therapy, but it's actually a painless procedure that involves placing custom-made clamp electrodes on a part of your ear called the tragus," said Susan Deuchars, author of the study and Director of Research at the School of Biomedical Sciences, said in the US TODAY'S HUI.

The therapy, called transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation, sends tiny currents of electricity into the ear that to travel to the nervous system of the body.

"It sounds pretty worrisome, going through the electric current, but we fix it to a point where the subject can only feel a slight tingle," said Deuchars.

The tingling feeling is the reason they called this "tickling". It was well tolerated by all participants in the two-week trial, she said. 26 people over 55 years were included in the study.

The ear is a gateway that scientists can use to alter the body's metabolic balance, said study author Beatrice Bretherton in the statement. By using the ear, they do not need drugs or invasive procedures.

The autonomic nervous system controls body functions that do not require reflection, such as breathing, digestion, heart rate, and blood pressure.

In the autonomic nervous system, there are two branches: parasympathetic and sympathetic, for rest activity and stress activity, respectively. Both branches work together to enable healthy physical activity.

The balance changes as people age and the friendly branch can begin to dominate. This domination can create an unhealthy imbalance in the automatic nervous system.

As a result, it can make the body more vulnerable to other diseases and deterioration of bodily functions.

They hoped that the therapy would improve the balance of the autonomic nervous system.

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After 15 minutes of daily treatment for two weeks, they brought the participants back to the lab and measured factors such as heart rate and blood pressure to judge the success rate of their test.

They discovered that tickling helped rebalance the body's autonomic nervous system, Deuchars said.

She reported experiencing an improvement in self-reported tension, depression, mood disorders, and sleep disorders..

The team believes that the therapy could be used to reduce the risk of age-related chronic diseases such as heart disease, hypertension and atrial fibrillation.

The next step, said Deuchars, is to entrust the study to a larger group in order to gain a more complete insight into the benefits of tickling treatment.

Follow Morgan Hines on Twitter: @MorganEmHines.