http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/E2501.full.pdf
This is certainly a lesson in the gyrations one must go through on the Internet to find substantive information that is not ridiculously technical for only specialists in the field.
psik
I would say that people who aren’t specialists in the field don’t really need to worry about it. Probably at least a decade away minimum, if everything goes perfect. Taking some drug every day and you might live an extra 10 years? Why not just eat right and exercise?
So I think the issue is should “young” people consider using the drug on themselves if they want? Most likely with a doctors supervision to be sure to stay below kidney destroying levels. By the time the bureaucracies have finished bumbling around millions of people could have lost years of their potential lives.
psik
Do you think getting young people to start taking daily medication under doctor supervision for their entire life in order to stave off diseases they might get 40 years later is an attractive proposition?
First of all it would be strictly voluntary and it would probably take 20 to 30 years to get truly trustworthy statistics on the matter. But lots of people take vitamin pills every day that cost more than this stuff so I don’t see the big deal of calling it “medication”.
I still haven’t found the graph of mouse mortality that I saw yesterday. That graph had twice as many treated mice still alive more than half way through the experiment even though the longest lived treated mouse only lasted about 15% longer than the longest lived untreated. I presume genetics is a significant factor in this issue. But young mice can’t determine longevity genetics of potential partners any more than young people. The drug does seem to result in a healthier middle age. Why should anyone object to that?
If the medication was expensive I could understand objections, but 16 cents per day!?! And produced in quantity it could get cheaper unless we allow supply/demand games. I don’t know how it is manufactured but it is cheap with 150 million people taking it world wide just for diabetes. If 2 billion people wanted it what would happen? That could temporarily drive the price up.
psik
Eat right and exercise? Can’t we do something less radical, like drugs and surgery?
Why not do both and potentially get 20 more years? And, in theory, something new might come along to give you 10 or 20 more as well. The longer you live the more potential there is that some new breakthrough might come along to extend your life further.
Not sure why folks think this is such an outlandish thing…after all, just look at the changes in not only life expectancy but in quality of life later in life we’ve experienced in just the last 50 years.
A couple of interesting points to be made. I have been taking metformin daily for 10 years. The very first side-effect was that with no change in diet, I lost 20 pounds over the ensuing two years. This is a known side-effect and there is no explanation that I could unearth. Maybe it juiced up my mitochondria. It has certainly worked to keep my A1c down (under 6%), as intended.
But the other interesting thing was a note on anti-oxidants. They were supposed to be anti-agathics. Remember the vitamin E craze, which fizzled when it turned out not to extend life and perhaps even the opposite? I think vitamin C was similar. Now it seems that metformin increases somewhat the amount of free oxygen and anti-oxidants block the effects, at least the anti-agathic effects. I wonder if anti-oxidants also block the main effect of metformin (on blood sugar).
If I were a worm, I would be clamoring for it.
I get the impression that some people are just knee jerk skeptics who won’t bother collecting enough information to understand what they are being skeptical about.
Someone asked the question a year ago when I had not even heard of the issue:
Should Everyone Take Metformin?
My point is that the stuff seems to be low risk and low cost but with a HUGE potential up side. I admit it just seems to be potential on the basis of available data but not much down side.
And that article does not even mention how cheap the stuff is.
psik
I don’t think it’s outlandish, I do have doubts that you can count on people taking pills every day of their life. For a 20 yr old the benefits might seem a little nebulous. The study quoted above said the medication had to be started quite early for its maximum effect - exactly when humans already think they’re immortal. Lol.
And this particular med has the potential for kidney disease if taken wrong. There would have to be a lot of monitoring, most especially when the subject is young and still maturing.
But mostly it’s like I said in my first post: when startling findings are announced before human trials, I will remain skeptical. There are lots of people working on aging from a number of different angles. I have no doubt some breakthrough will eventually happen.
I also have been taking metformin for close to a decade (although not for diabetes - in my case it was prescribed to regulate a host complications associated with polycystic ovarian syndrome).
I can assure you I do not feel particularly immortal. We can check back in 80 years to see if I make it to 120, but it seems unlikely.
I would also like to point out that metformin is not without side-effects, a good many of them fairly unpleasant. If it weren’t relatively effective at managing my life-threatening symptoms, I’d quit taking it immediately. For starters, a common side-effect is near-constant nausea. Another common side-effect is appetite suppression (incidentally, according to my endocrinologist, Hari Seldon, this is what causes the weight loss for the most part). When I say “appetite suppression” I mean both “no sensation of hunger” and “no desire to eat at all” - to the point where frequently the mere thought of eating is actually repulsive. This is less fun than it sounds.
When I first started taking it, I spent the first three years with near-constant nausea, no appetite to speak of, a nasty metallic taste in my mouth constantly, and constant muscle cramping of the charley-horse variety. After almost ten years, and a whole, whole lot of monkey around with various dosages and formulations, I’m down to muscle cramping and lack of appetite for side-effects, but both are pretty significantly unpleasant. Painful muscle cramping is intrinsically no goddamn fun, but the appetite suppression is actually worse for me. For starters, since metformin is artificially affecting your blood sugar, it is really important to eat at regular intervals to avoid blood sugar crashes and I cannot depend on my body to notify me when it wants fuel because my sensation of hunger (including belly rumbling and all that) disappeared. Completely disappeared. So to avoid crashing blood sugar, I have to regiment my eating schedule pretty tightly. If I don’t, the first time I’ll realize I haven’t eaten food is when, for example, the pounding headache, shakes, dizziness and sweating of low blood-sugar hit me in the face. At the same time, no food sounds tasty. I mean it seems like it would be tasty in the abstract, but the thought of food holds literally no attraction to me. Which is freaking lame - I used to really enjoy eating good food.
Do you really want to live to 120 if it means being nauseated every goddamn day of your life and having the thought of food make you gag? Or if it meant frequent charley horse style cramps in random muscles forever? (You know what’s fun? Charley horse cramping in your neck and scalp muscles!)
This is a human trial:
78,000 people were given metaformin for diabetes.
It was not a trial for longevity, it was a retroactive statistical study of diabetes. It is simply that the data turned up information that was not expected. The mice that died of kidney failure were given 10 times as much as those that benefited from the metformin. I have not seen anything about a test for minimum necessary for effect. I have no idea how doctors decide how much to administer for diabetes.
The reduced mortality was a “side effect”.
If someone told me when I was 20 years old that I could probably have a healthier middle age for 20 cents a day and just take a pill every morning I would not have had the slightest problem with it. I find it strange that I have not encountered this for a year due to the media not making a bigger deal of it.
psik
I feel compelled to point out that people who are prescribed metformin for diabetes quite frequently make a host of other life changes simultaneous to their prescription - many of which have been linked time and again to increased lifespan. Things like “paying careful attention to a healthy diet” and “regular exercise” and the like. I see no indication (and I may be mistaken) that that study controlled for the other life changes the people prescribed metformin were encouraged to make (and quite a number of them likely did - being diagnosed with diabetes is quite often enough to shock people into a generally healthier lifestyle than they had previously).
The thing about Metformin, at least in the Breakthrough show I watched on Sunday, was not that it’s the be all and end all. The deal with it is that it showed that a single drug taken by a large population had a measurable effect on people living longer verse a control that didn’t take it and verse groups that took alternatives for the same condition. What they were trying to tell the FDA using Metformin as an example is that there could be drugs or combinations of drugs that could and would have an effect, and thus the FDA should allow for companies to have a testing regime and a path to get those sorts of drugs approved…not that Metformin is that drug in the end. It opens a path however that doesn’t current exist (at least according to the show) to get drugs tested and approved for human longevity.
Yes, but you can take any object, no matter how small, and any experimental outcomes will be perfectly consistent no matter how much you increase the scale.
Did/do you do 20 minutes of exercise a day?
It’s not a knee jerk reaction when we have heard stuff like this before. Increasing human longevity has been just around the corner. The same corner that fusion power, strong AI, New York to Tokyo in less than 2 hours, lasting peace with Canada, and space habitats.
It WILL take longer than we think. Also I have no interest in living any longer than I have to.
Or like personal computers you can have on your desk, phones you can carry around anywhere or drugs that can make an 80 year old get up and scrump? 
Yeah, that stuff will never happen! Nor air planes that can fly between Europe and America or silly ideas of men flying to the moon!
The thing is, there is a lot of research going on in this field, and a lot of different vectors coming together. Also…fusion might not be as far away as you think, though it’s certainly harder than they originally thought it would be. However, ITER will be, in theory, up and running in 2019, which should show us a lot. And that international space station thingy is kind of a ‘space habitat’…just sayin’…
As long as you don’t try to substitute one scale for another. Such as, say, toothpicks and washers for the World Trade Center. 
I never said that nor did I say it would never happen. My point is just that we will have to wait and see.
But what do I know? I’m just a fucked up ignorant idiot who barely graduated from HS 36 years ago.