Anti-aging drug metformin could let you live to 120 in good health for 10 cents a day.
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Medicine
Stashed in: #health, Best PandaWhale Posts, Awesome, Coffee!, Longevity!, Diabetes, Aging, Health, Retirement, Longevity, Anti Aging
The world's first anti-aging drug will be tested on humans next year in FDA trials that could result in people being able to live healthily well into their 120s for a drug that costs just 10 cents a day:
Scientists now believe it is possible to stop people growing old and consign diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to history.
Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go-ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.
If successful it will mean that a person in their 70s would be as biologically healthy as a 50-year-old.
Ageing expert Prof Gordon Lithgow, of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California, is one of the study advisers. He said: "If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well.
That's revolutionary. That's never happened before.
"I have been doing research into ageing for 25 years and the idea that we would be talking about a clinical trial in humans for an anti-ageing drug would have been thought inconceivable.
"But there is every reason to believe it's possible. The future is taking the biology that we've now developed and applying it to humans."
Ageing is not an inevitable part of life because all cells contain a DNA blueprint which could keep a body functioning correctly for ever. Some marine creatures do not age - or grow weaker as time passes - at all.
However, over our lifetime billions of cell divisions must occur to keep our bodies functioning correctly and the more times cells divide the more problems grow, and cells can no longer repair damage.
Scientists think the best candidate for an anti-ageing drug is metformin, the world's most widely used diabetes drug which costs just 10 cents a day.
Metformin increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell, which appears to boost robustness and longevity.
When Belgian researchers tested metformin on the tiny roundworm C. elegans the worms not only aged slower, but they also stayed healthier longer. Last year Cardiff University found anecdotal evidence that when patients with diabetes were given the drug metformin they lived longer than others without the condition, even though they should have died eight years earlier on average.
Top Reddit comments:
Metformin is a standard anti-diabetic drug, taken by millions since 1957. You would think its anti-ageing powers would have now stood revealed. History.
...
That's exactly why they're looking into this drug. From the article:
Last year Cardiff University found anecdotal evidence that when patients with diabetes were given the drug metformin they lived longer than others without the condition, even though they should have died eight years earlier on average.
According to this article:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Endocrinology/Diabetes/49375
we're talking about 70 million "prescriptions" per year in the US. That's a huge number and should have had some reflection in the data beyond "anecdotal evidence popping into the head of some researcher in Wales" if this stuff really can make us live to be 120 years old.
That's a valid point. It's premature to celebrate but hopefully this will bring better understanding.
Sign me up! As long as I can still become eccentric tho...
Of course you can become eccentric Tara! Age is just a number.
Another article on the anti aging properties of metformin:
Good quote:
Multiple drug candidates, many already on the market for immune or psychiatric disorders, have consistently delayed age-associated diseases and stretched the lifespan of fruit flies, roundworms and mice. Yet human trials have been far beyond reach — without the FDA acknowledging “aging” as a legitimate target for drug development, researchers have had no way of pitching clinical trials to the regulatory agency.
Until now.
This year, the FDA green lighted an audacious proposal that seeks to test in 3,000 volunteers a drug that — based on animal studies — could extend human lifespan by up to 40 percent and decrease chances of getting age-related diseases. The double-blind, multi-centered trial, Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME), is the first that pushes aging as a bona fide disease — one that may eventually be tamed with drugs.
“We think this is a groundbreaking, perhaps paradigm-shifting trial,” said Dr. Steven Austad, scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).
Coffee also has anti aging properties:
"We found smoking, high BMI and consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to increase the predicted chronological age by 2–6 years, while consumption of fatty fish, drinking moderate amounts of coffee and exercising reduced the predicted age by approximately the same amount."
Source:
http://nature.com/articles/srep17282
https://reddit.com/r/science/comments/3vhz5e/protein_profiling_reveals_consequences_of/
1:03 AM Dec 01 2015