http://finance.yahoo.com/news/could-stay-forever-young-young-205518256.html
We can’t live forever yet, but we may be getting closer to living a bit longer. Thanks to a new anti-aging drug,
scientists believe they may have found a way to stop the body from
falling victim to the perils of old age, including degenerative diseases
like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The hope is that the drug would not
only allow people to live longer, but would also allow its users to
maintain a relatively high level of health, making their extended years
feel more like a gift than a burden.
With
the goal of sustaining healthy human life to the age of 110 or even
120, the diabetes drug metformin has already met with success in animal
trials, and now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given the
green light for human trials. Ideally, it would allow for people at the
age of 70 to enjoy the health of 50-year-olds, an unprecedented feat in
medicine.
“If you target an
aging process and you slow down aging then you slow down all the
diseases and pathology of aging as well,” said Professor Gordon Lithgow
of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California, who serves
as one of the study advisors. “That’s revolutionary,” he continued.
“That’s never happened before.”
The
drug, which is cheaply available for just $0.16 a day, works by
boosting the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell, which in
turn seems to benefit the robustness and longevity of the body’s basic
building blocks. The proposed test will involve around 3,000 individuals
between the ages of 70 and 80 who either have or are at risk for
cancer, heart disease, and dementia. Scientists hope that metformin
would not only be able to stop the onset of these diseases, but also
lead to sustained life.
“I
have been doing research into aging for 25 years and the idea that we
would be talking about a clinical trial in humans for an anti-aging drug
would have been though inconceivable,” Lithgow said. “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. Twenty years ago
aging was a biological mystery. Now we are starting to understand what
is going on.”
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