How One Amino Acid Touches Two Aging Pathways

How One Amino Acid Touches Two Aging Pathways

From Daily Value by William Wallace, Ph.D.

December 9, 2025 · 10 min

About this episode

This episode explores the unexpected effects of L-arginine on aging pathways and cognitive performance.

L-arginine is usually treated as a simple nitric-oxide precursor, a molecule with a narrow vascular role. But across multiple lines of research, it keeps appearing in places it shouldn’t: improving cerebral blood flow in older adults, shifting cognitive performance, and, most unexpectedly, altering how amyloid-β proteins aggregate in the brain. This episode unpacks why these effects are so unusual, and how they connect to the long-standing arginine paradox: the biochemical mismatch between ho...

People in this episode

Host: William Wallace

Topics covered

  • aging
  • cognitive performance
  • vascular health
  • nitric oxide
  • brain health
  • arginine paradox

Keywords

  • L-arginine
  • nitric oxide
  • cerebral blood flow
  • cognitive performance
  • amyloid-β
  • aging pathways

Mentioned in this episode

Products: L-arginine

Books & works: amyloid-β

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