Could an ordinary diabetes pill slow the ageing process? – Express

Scientists believe so and, far from sketchy herbal supplements or vitamin pills, these are real medicines that could defer or prevent the decline we all experience as we get older. And they could be with us sooner than you think. Though most of us think of ageing as inevitable, researchers have been working for years to uncover different ways to slow it down, and even reverse it.

We now have dozens of methods of altering the ageing process in the lab, from diets, to drugs, to gene therapies, making everything from flies to fish to mice biologically younger. But can we do this in humans?

The good news is scientists increasingly believe there may be ways to slow human ageing. One of the most promising results of this research is that we may not even need to develop new medicines to make this possible: existing drugs might be able to slow down ageing meaning it could be just a few years before we can all benefit.

One leading contender is diabetes treatment metformin one of the world's most widely prescribed drugs. Millions of people in the UK already take it. It's usually prescribed to treat the high blood sugar levels that diabetes causes, but a 2014 study showed its effects could be much broader.

Medical records from 180,000 NHS patients were analysed to see how metformin stacked up against other diabetes drugs, and a "control" group of people without diabetes, and therefore not taking medicine for it.

The breakthrough finding was that diabetics taking metformin actually outlived the non-diabetic controls who weren't on the drug all the more surprising because patients without diabetes tended to be less overweight and have fewer other conditions such as heart disease.

Other studies have shown metformin may decrease the risk of cancer, heart disease and dementia, too. So should we all be taking it?

Though the evidence is compelling, it's probably worth waiting for the results of a proper trial about to start in the US of metformin as a drug to fight ageing.

The TAME trial short for Targeting Ageing with Metformin will give 1,500 60-80-year-old volunteers the drug while another 1,500 receive placebo tablets. Then the patients will be watched for several years.

If those taking the real pills get less cancer, heart disease, dementia and so on than those on the fakes, we'll know for certain that metformin slows down ageing as we suspect it might.

One of the challenges of getting an anti-ageing drug approved by regulators is that drugs usually need to treat a particular disease and ageing isn't currently recognised as one.

However, the other exciting aspect of the TAME trial is that the scientists involved have worked closely with American medicines regulator, the FDA, when designing their trial.

That means, even if metformin turns out to be a dud, they've created a pathway to get these kinds of drugs approved in future.

And there are plenty more waiting to follow in metformin's footsteps.

Another contender started its journey in the unusual location of tropical Easter Island, deep in the Pacific Ocean, and home of the famous stone Moai statues with their gigantic heads.

A soil sample collected from the island known in Polynesian as Rapa Nui was found to contain bacteria with antifungal properties. The drug isolated from these bacteria was christened rapamycin after its place of discovery.

Further work uncovered that it also suppresses our immune systems, which would be somewhat counter-productive in an antifungal medicine because it would weaken our bodies' own defences against infection.

Rapamycin eventually found its place as a drug used to help stop the immune systems of transplant patients from rejecting their new organs but research since has shown it could have an even more significant application as an anti-ageing medicine.

Rapamycin, it turns out, can mimic a process called "dietary restriction", where we feed animals less and find that, as a result, they live longer.

This isn't just the kind of diet you might go on to lose a bit of weight, but a lifelong cutting back on calories, carefully balanced to ensure the animals get all the nutrients they need.

On such a diet, mice can live more than 50 percent longer than siblings allowed to eat what they like.

When scientists noticed that rapamycin caused similar biological effects to dietary restriction, they were keen to test it out and they found it extended lifespan in mice by 10 percent.

Even better, this result holds when it's given to old mice, the biological equivalent of human 60-somethings meaning, if it does work in people, we could find out in time to benefit even those of us who are no longer spring chickens.

Counterintuitively, though large doses of rapamycin suppress the immune system, smaller doses seem to rejuvenate it, probably through the drug's anti-ageing effects.

Trials using a related drug showed that it could improve older people's response to a flu jab, and reduce their subsequent risk of infection.

There were also proposals to trial it as a preventative pill to reduce the impact of Covid-19 in British care homes.

Hopefully some of these anti-ageing drugs will be available in time for the next pandemic: we've all seen how much extra risk older people were at if they caught the virus, so if we could all have biologically younger immune systems, so much the better.

One finding, however, of anti-ageing science may come as a shock: vitamin supplements are mostly ineffective when it comes to extending our lives.

The rationale for many vitamin pills is that they work as "antioxidants", clearing up so-called "free radicals" which can damage the DNA and proteins that make up the inside of our cells, and were thought for decades to be a key villain in the ageing process.

However, recent research has overturned this theory, and the biggest and most reliable studies of vitamin pills have found that they don't have much effect on how long we live.

When scientists combined studies, including more than 300,000 people taking the supplements, they found vitamins A and C, along with selenium, had no effect on lifespan, and vitamin E and beta-carotene actually slightly increased risk of death.

So, unless your doctor has told you to take them because you're lacking a particular vitamin, it might be worth rethinking any supplements you're taking, because they might be doing more to reduce your bank balance than extend your life.

Thankfully, however, there are many other drugs with potential anti-ageing properties under investigation.

A compound called spermidine, found in lots of foods, including mushrooms and cheddar cheese, is another potential mimic of dietary restriction. And scientists are also investigating drug combinations.

A chemo drug called dasatinib plus a supplement called quercetin has been found to remove aged cells from our bodies, and make mice live longer and healthier.

And a cocktail of metformin plus two hormones has improved immune function in older men, and reduced their biological age.

This range of different approaches shows anti-ageing medicine isn't some sci-fi pipe dream or a strange fluke seen only in mice in the lab, but that they could be with us pretty soon. With so many drugs in the pipeline to potentially slow ageing, it's a truly exciting time to be alive.

It's also a very important time to understand the science of ageing, because in only a few years we might all be able to get pills to keep us alive and healthy a little longer.

Ageless: The New Science Of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele (Bloomsbury, 9.99) is out now.

For free UK P&P on orders over 20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com

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Could an ordinary diabetes pill slow the ageing process? - Express