Immortality is Not the Goal
Metformin and the promise of an extended HEALTH-SPAN
So I knew this morning that I would have nothing already in draft to share in my “usual” Thursday post here. It has been (and might continue for months, to be That Kind of Week.
Not to worry. I had a couple of interesting (to me) articles on Insect Hearing I would work on as Thursday approached. Yeah, kind of a geek-biologist’s page-turner; and I might come back to that.
But it would be hard to find any reader NOT interested in their own extension of healthy aging by means that are accessible to potentially billions of people. I just lifted the lid on this with my first cup of coffee this morning.
And…as a matter of fact, I’ve been dealing this week with the health of my (until now) ridiculously-healthy cognitively-intact almost-97-year-old mother. I think she would be considered a “super-ager.” But why? Is aging and the enormous healthcare burden that diseases of later decades hold for us BOOMERS a condition more subject to intervention than we had thought?
I’ve started taking a look at this topic, and my brief notes from this morning, I have lazily pasted below. I hope you’ll take a quick glance, bookmark this post, and come back from time to time to follow and add to these links to learn more.
So buck-ohs and buck-ettes, it may be too late for you to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But think of your children and grand-children avoiding the medical indignities of age by deferring ill-health until the extended end of a healthier life. Read on!
METFORMIN AND #aging
Forget the Blood of Teens. Metformin Promises to Extend Life for a Nickel a Pill | WIRED
This is a long-ish article from WIRED. But you can Click this link to reduce reading time. Peruse my annotations (and learn a bit about the tool used to curate this web article. )
Galega officinalis - Wikiwand the wild weed that lead pharmaceutical research to develop metformin, the featured molecule in this thread.
The Age of Aging on NatGeo - American Federation for Aging Research
On Sunday, November 29, several AFAR experts were featured in a National Geographic Channel special, BREAKTHROUGH: The Age of Aging, gaining incomparable visibility for the field of aging research by reaching millions of viewers nationwide.
Directed and narrated by Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, The Age of Aging was part of the BREAKTHROUGH series spotlighting scientific innovations poised to have real-world impact in the near future. The series was developed by GE and National Geographic Channel.
The Age of Aging episode opened with a meeting at the AFAR headquarters between scientists and AFAR leadership to prepare an upcoming meeting with the FDA to discuss the TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) trial, whose planning process AFAR has helped support.
QUESTION:
How would a 10-year extension of average lifespan impact a planet already stressed by human needs for housing, food, minerals, paper, wood and water?
What’s good for one species is not necessarily good for all living things. If we’ve learned nothing else since the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene, we should understand this. So think ahead to 2050: Ten billion of us, living to 110.
Hi Fred! I was prescribed Metformin for my diabetes and to my horror, it altered my sense of taste so much that macadamia ice cream tasted like salty cold cream. It took a while for this strangeness to wear off, I urge your readers to be cautious and read all of the side effects from taking metformin. Just to show you I am serious about the risk here is a small segment from webmd.
One large study has linked long-term metformin use to higher chances of getting Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. But more research is needed to understand the connection better and what it means.
Rare Side Effects of Metformin
Some people (in one study, it was less than 5%) reported heartburn, headaches, upper respiratory infection, and a bad taste in their mouth when they took extended-release metformin. Up to 12% of people on the regular formula had those side effects. They also reported flu-like symptoms, sweating, flushing, heart palpitations, rashes, and nail problems.
As they say on the more optimistic sites, Your results may vary. I urge you all to do your own research.