- Research is underway on potential strategies to extend life.
- Meta-analysis found that the drug rapamycin prolongs life in several vertebrate species.
- Rapamycin appeared to prolong life at a similar level to dietary restrictions.
How to extend your life is an important area of scientific research. Experts are interested in drugs that can prolong your lifespan.
The results confirmed that dietary restrictions appear to prolong life, and that rapamycin offers similar benefits.
Researchers also found that metformin appears to have not extended life. Further research is needed to see how rapamycin helps people increase their lifespan.
In the paper, researchers point out that reducing food intake without malnutrition appears to extend life, but this strategy is difficult for people to stick to. Therefore, examining drugs that could produce similar effects is an area of research.
The two drugs that were the focus of this analysis were rapamycin and metformin. According to the National Cancer Institute,
This analysis included a systematic literature search to find relevant data. The final analysis includes data from 167 papers examining eight species of total vertebrate animals, seeking to find out how both drugs affect lifespan and how they compared dietary restrictions.
The researchers extracted information about the mean and median life expectancy from the paper.
In this analysis, the two dietary restriction was reduced calories and fasting, and researchers sought to see if the results differed based on the gender of the animal involved.
The data came from animals like mice, mice, turquoise murders, and rhesus monkeys. Overall, more men were studied than women. There is also most of the data on dietary restrictions, and the most common type of dietary restrictions was to reduce the number of calories.
Regarding dietary restrictions, the findings suggested significant variation in effectiveness.
Overall, the researchers found that dietary restrictions and rapamycin had similar effects and appeared to contribute to long-term life. Metformin appeared to have minimal effect on extended life span.
With the exception of one metformin model, there appeared to be no consistent differences between male and female animals in terms of lifespan.
Research author Zahida SultanovaPhD, an early career research fellow at Leverfurum at the University of East Anglia in the UK, summarized the important findings of the study. Today’s medical news:
“We have seen whether two most famous ‘diet mimics’ drugs extend lifespans similar to dieting in animals. By pooling data from 167 studies, we discovered whether rapamycin is nearly as reliable as eating less to increase lifespan.
This study analyzed animal data but did not include data on people. Furthermore, most of these studies investigated only a small number of species, where these animals were involved in the laboratory environment.
This meta-analysis may have influenced the results as it was also a study of only three researchers, and sometimes only one researcher did the composition of the work.
More research into the drug may be useful as researchers have the lowest amount of data on metformin.
They also worked under the assumption that if the paper did not specify male or female subjects, it was a mixed group and that it could have been wrong.
The authors further point out that “the results were sensitive to the way lifespan was reported.”
Researchers also acknowledge strong publication bias and a lot of heterogeneity. Furthermore, the type of measurement used in the research report reports the affected results. In one measurement, the effect on lifespan was eliminated due to rapamycin.
In most cases, the authors did not find consistent differences in animal gender-based results. They explain that this may be because there are differences in the taxonomic groups studied. […] Calculated effect size. ”
Sultanova made the following note regarding the findings:
“This study includes numerous scientific studies conducted on a variety of organisms, such as mice, fish, and monkeys. However, these drugs were not tested in humans for extended life spans, so human survival results are not included.
Researchers suggest a need for research involving other species in natural and laboratory environments. They also note that there is a need to understand the need to understand the difference in the effects of “different strains of the same species exposed to the same treatment.”
Future research can further focus on the differences between rapamycin and metformin and why they have different effects on lifespan. More studies on the differences in male and female outcomes with rapamycin may also be helpful.
More research will be conducted to see whether rapamycin can promote long-term lives in people, but this area may have some challenges.
Mir AliMD, board-certified general surgeon, obesity surgeon, and medical director of the Memorial Care Surgery Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California, said he was not involved in the study. MNT Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant and therefore contributes to the lifespan of the immune system. ”
According to him, “The most logical next step is to explore human discoveries. However, this is a difficult study to design because it is used in certain cancers and organ transplants and has serious side effects.”
Nevertheless, the results show the potential benefits of rapamycin, which guarantees more studies.
Sultanova explained: “Clinically, we place rapamycin (and the target mTOR pathway) on the front of the cue for future anti-aging therapies in humans. As this compound was already used in organ transplant patients, medical professionals understand the potential side effects.
“The next step is to improve the compound to a ‘Rapalog’ version, awaiting the results of ongoing human trials testing lower and intermittent doses of rapamycin, and maintaining benefits while omitting side effects such as immunosuppression,” she said.
“Another important next step is to develop drugs that are similar in structure and function that have no side effects from rapamycin. Scientists have already begun purifying rapamycin and are beginning to produce what is called rapamycin,” pointed out Sultanova.
