Metformin’s Review
Metformin is an antidiabetic medication taken by mouth. It’s a popular treatment for type 2 diabetes, but it has recently been associated with longer lifespans – like the ability to live to 120 years old. Here’s our guide to the anti-aging benefits of Metformin.
What is Metformin?
Metformin is traditionally used to treat type 2 diabetes. However, it’s been making headlines around the world in recent weeks for its purported ability to help humans live to 120 years old.
According to experts, the drug can be used to extend healthy life and lifespan while also staving off illnesses associated with aging – like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Metformin has been the world’s most widely-used diabetes drug for years. Over the past six decades on the market, it has become the first line drug of choice for many doctors trying to treat diabetes. Recently, tests conducted on animals showed that metformin could also have the potential to slow down the aging process.
Metformin is typically marketed under the trade name Glucophage, although it also goes by a few other names.
How Does Metformin Work?
Metformin treats symptoms of type 2 diabetes by suppressing glucose production in the liver and increasing sensitivity to insulin.
Recent tests on laboratory mice and worms have indicated that metformin might have additional anti-aging effects.
Those tests were performed by Belgian researchers on roundworms (C. elegans). During a series of tests on these worms, researchers discovered that metformin prolonged the lives of the roundworms “by making them age more slowly and keeping them healthier for longer.”
Follow-up tests on several different varieties of mice revealed similar benefits.
There’s also anecdotal evidence that has accumulated over the years. Experts at Cardiff University, for example, point to anecdotal evidence that human patients treated with metformin for diabetes live longer than expected – even living longer than many people with diabetes.
Typically, those with diabetes have shorter lifespans because they’re more susceptible to heart and kidney diseases.
Ultimately, these animal tests have led researchers to a surprising conclusion: if the animal results are replicated in humans, then metformin’s anti-aging benefits could ultimately help humans live beyond 120 years old.
Of course, there hasn’t been a single human test on the anti-aging benefits of metformin thus far. That’s the next step.
Human Tests on Metformin Aim to Replicate Anti-Aging Benefits
After the groundbreaking research performed in Europe, American researchers are planning to conduct a study on metformin’s effects on humans.
That study is called Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) and will begin early in 2016.
The goal of the study is to determine if the benefits of metformin in animals can be replicated in humans.
The study will involve 3,000 American adults between ages 70 and 80 with a known risk of cancer, heart disease, and neurodegenerative diseases.
A group of these participants will be instructed to take metformin. Then, they’ll be monitored to see if metformin has a significant preventative effect on disease conditions, whether it increases overall lifespan, or if it affects the progress of various diseases.
The trial has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
If the trial study proceeds like the animal studies, then the results may be significant. Researchers believe that 70 year olds who are taking metformin and other anti-aging therapies could have the same biological age, health, and vitality as healthy people in their 50s.
Why Metformin?
There’s actually some evidence that there are other drugs more powerful than metformin at turning back the clock on aging.
However, researchers have chosen to study the anti-aging benefits of metformin because it has repeatedly been proven to be a safe drug for humans after six decades of use for controlling type 2 diabetes.
This proven safety record increases the likelihood that metformin could be the first anti-aging drug approved by the FDA.
News website TheInquisitr interviewed aging expert Professor Gordon Lithgow for his thoughts on the upcoming study. Here’s what he had to say:
“If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of aging as well. That’s revolutionary. That’s never happened before.”
Lithgow followed up by saying,
“I have been doing research into ageing for 25 years and the idea that we would be talking about clinical trial in humans for an anti-ageing drug would have been thought inconceivable. But there is every reason to believe it is possible. The future is taking the biology that we’ve developed and applying it to humans.”
Ultimately, people are excited about metformin’s anti-aging benefits because it means that aging could just be another disease that could be treated.
Aging is a disease that all of us suffer from constantly. If we can learn to diagnose, manage, treat, and prevent that disease, then we can increase human lifespans beyond any lifespan in human history.
