Drug cocktail almost doubles lifespan of worms
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
Why not all that important?
1) The current record for nematode life extension - without extending the dauer stage indefinitely, an approach that has no analogue in higher species - is a tenfold extension of life.
2) Stress response upregulation of the sort accomplished here has outcomes that diminish as species life span increases. Where we can compare directly, calorie restriction and growth hormone knockout, the result in humans is constrained to be no more than a few years of additional life. Anything larger would already have shown up in the data.
So why is it that the research and development community don't undertake combinatorial treatments to any significant degree? I blame regulation and intellectual property law. Those items combine to make it much harder to find and deploy potentially synergistic therapies than to just go and work on some new single therapy. Thus there is much more work on new single therapies than one finding combinations of existing therapies that might do much better than either on its own.
That nobody cares is proof that if there's no money or ability to politically influence by reporting it, nobody will ever find out about it. Things are brought to the surface by coordinated action, either political or economic. Everything else stays buried largely because there's simply too much stuff to look at and it takes concerted efforts to bring things to peoples attention. Political propaganda and advertising are multi-billion dollar industries for a reason.
I could not access the paywalled paper. Gratefully fanzhang answered my question below:
fanzhang:>The paper says: Metformin, Psora-4, Rapamycin, Rifampicin, and Allantoin.
Here's a 2017 article w/o paywall which identified the five drugs above and also the best combinations (for worms) at that time:
"Rapamycin,rifampicin, Psora-4 cocktail doubles lifespan":
https://alivebynature.com/rapamycinrifampicin-psora-4-cockta...
The article states that the most successful one(at that time) was rapamycin + rifampicin + allantoin, resulting in a doubling of mean lifespan.
I'm not sure if the paper mentions the drugs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153458071...
"The drug rapamycin is currently administered following organ transplants to prevent the body's immune system from rejecting the transplanted organs, but previous experiments by other research groups showed that it extends the lifespan of many organisms, including the C. elegans worms, fruit flies and mice"
Dr Gruber's team administered combinations of two or three compounds targeting different ageing pathways to C. elegans (worms).
As a friendly reminder, the guidelines state: “Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."”
A better question in the first place would be - I read the article but am unable to figure out which are the drugs actually used as I do not have much background in Bio/Pharma science
This may be culture-dependent, but I guess most people would feel it that way.
Of course, in the context of anti-aging, Metformin may have other beneficial effects outside of moderating glucose levels.
Another good recent study is the intestinal stem cell regenerative boost after a 24 hour fast in mice.
One might say that the links are still not solid, but we do know that lowering glucose levels might be a good idea (hence the interest in metformin) and fasting/keto certainly achieves that without a drug.
0. https://www.marksdailyapple.com/health-benefits-of-intermitt...
I do fast occasionally, but not as often as I'd wish.
Also see https://www.gwern.net/Longevity#metformin for more info.
Episode 16: Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/10/01/epis...
> Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects — or curing it altogether? — even in human beings.
Only two neurons are for memory (interneurons as the neural substrates of mechanosensory memory).
Cut their balls off, they live longer [1] Starve them, they live longer [2]
Any volunteers?
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(06)00237-6 [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1474-9726...
I don't, however C. Elegans has an average lifespan around 2–3 WEEKS.
That doesn't give them a whole lot of time to be exposed to damage from umpteen sources of radiation, environmental pollutants, stress, etc unlike humans that live 7 decades (the current worldwide life expectancy is 70.5 years) which is more than 400 times longer.
That said, many of the pathways that are central to mammalian cancers are there in C. Elegans, which still makes it a valuable model organism for cancer research.
(well, ignoring the figurative worms, who were not in this study)
It seemed on point for this post: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
If so you should probably update your comment to say "invest" instead of "save," which sounds nitpicky but the difference is huge.
(that's what's happening in Europe with the age of retirement being raised left and right. I mean it's just in e.g. Greece but where I live it's gone up by 2 years because there's a slightly older generation that are now all retiring, and the system is based on growth - that is, a younger generation paying for the retirement of the older one - instead of on saving, which causes the system to collapse unless they make people work longer.
So retirees are always extracting some fraction of the productive output of current labor. This fraction can go up or down depending on the economic growth rate and expectation of standard of living of retirees.
Social Security in the US has lent ~$2.6-2.9 trillion from its trust fund to the US government; imagine if that had been spent on driving down the cost of caring for the elderly instead of frivolous wars and tax cuts. You can't save up for the future to pay for expenses you can't predict; you have to invest today's dollars in getting ahead of the curve, to drastically drive down the cost of future predicted services you'll need to provide.
TL;DR Invest resources today to ensure a steep cost decline curve for existing in the future.
And here's the paywalled paper: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1534-5807(18)3...
There must be a forum out there with scientists and biohackers that document their findings and process without fear of legal fallout. Maybe there is a Tor hidden site?
Which is fair of course, they put the effort in.
I don't recommend humans just take this cocktail. I imagine the paper combinatorially tried a ton of different chemicals and this set happened to work well.
In humans: Metfomrin has been used on human studies of life extension. Rapamycin is an immunosupressant in humans. Rifamycin is an antibiotic. Allantoin and Psora-4 are not recognized by the FDA as common human medications.
Seems like a common thread for the human-medication subset is anti-inflammation.
Even if it did translate to humans ok you might live lonver but what about your mental health, what about your memory, what about your joints, what about your vision?
I'd rather die at 40, 50 or 60 than die at 150 blind as a bat unsure of who I am or where I am 23 hours of the day being pulled around in some sort of neutral buoyancy contraption that keeps me from getting bedsores because my joints are so deteriorated even standing is quite painful.
Every single proponent and scientist working on longetivity aims at increasing the life quality also, along with lifespan. It's an obvious thing to do and to aim for, and everyone seriously working in the field does this already. They are not looking to make humans live 150 years at the 80-year-old life quality, they are looking to expand and extend the life quality, so that the same quality at 40, 50, 60 years etc - to last for longer, thus extending the overall range as well...
Maybe because zero progress has been made in regards to cognitive decline, vision preservation/restoration and retarding or reversing joint deterioration?
Just a hunch...
Worldwide life expectancy is 1.48 times what it was in 1950 and yet:
- Cancer rates have experienced a 6% (Leukemia) to 183% (Multiple Myeloma) since 1950
- 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 65 has Alzheimer’s.
- According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction
- For women, they can start to show signs of joint pain due to aging after age 50, while men are likely to see it before age 45
- Roughly 7 million people in the United States are living with a total hip or knee replacement. Continuing pain is common.
So cool, some worms live an extra 2-3 weeks and have infinitely less exposure to UV radiation, wholly lack joints, have incredibly simpler brains, live orders of magnitude less to be exposed to random radiation and countless compounds that can cause genetic mutations and damage, experiences orders of magnitude less environmental stress over their lifespan etc.
I think a lot of the real world gains in life span are coming from entirely different things though, like treating and preventing heart attacks and cancer. This does end up extending the "old" part of our lives.
If the human population was serious about quality-of-life improvement, they would eat healthy and exercise. But they don't. Most people in this forum don't.
It seems weird to criticize the second approach because the first approach has made so much more progress extending lifespan than healthspan.
You won't think so when you turn 40.
I watched my father's quality of life tank drastically when I was 12 before he died of cancer.
I've watched my mother that's now in her mid 60's deteriorate rapidly in just the past decade after getting thyroid dancer, developing semi-rapid bone deterioration, COPD and type II diabetes.
My father's father fell off of the first step of a ladder and died a few days later as a result.
My mother's father is in his late 80's and has severely been suffering from dementia the past several years. His wife died a few months ago having been on oxygen for over a decade and herself experiencing advanced dementia at the end.
I stand by what I said, I'd rather go out at 40 than spend a few, or several, decades miserable.