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Anti-Aging Drug Could Extend Our Crazy-Old-Lady Years
Posted On Dec 04 2015
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With the decline of the biological effects of aging, an increase in life span is possible, including a possible treatment of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Do you ever think that it’s kinda insane that we can order pizza from our cellphones and yet no one can figure out how to stop (or at least slow) the inevitable march towards death?
“If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well”, said Professor Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California, who will lead the study, reported Daily Mail.
Matthew Hirschey, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University said metformin has already been proven by researchers to extend the life of animals. Its implication is that people would not die of old age when they reach their 70s, 80s or 90s but possibly live until they reach 110 or 120, without the ailments that accompany those hard years. Researchers will begin testing Metformin, a medication used to treat diabetes, as an anti-aging drug in a clinical trial next year.
Prof. Lithgow informed that he has been carrying out researches on aging for as many as 25 years, but all these years the idea of conducting clinical trials in humans to test an anti-aging drug has been something absolutely inconceivable.
The TAME trial will begin next year and will monitor the effects of Metformin on adults between the ages of 70 and 80, the Telegraph reports, but it will still be a while before it’s known if Metformin is the “cure for aging” some hope it will be. Some will get the drug and others will get a placebo, but no one will know which group they’re in (in other words, it’s a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial).
He says that by slowing aging in humans, even by just a little, people could live longer and feel young. Tested on mice, it was discovered that it can prolong their life up to 40%. “The future is taking the biology that we’ve now developed and applying it to humans”.
