
Could ibuprofen be an anti-aging medicine? - ca98am79
http://www.kurzweilai.net/could-ibuprofen-be-an-anti-aging-medicine?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=73cffdd08b-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-73cffdd08b-281895037
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davidgerard
Kurzweil's anti-aging medication thing has long ago taken a left-turn straight
into pseudoscience. He has a thriving sideline selling unproven supplements as
well.

If he hits anything with evidence to it, it's by accident.

To be fair, he appears to completely believe what he's pushing. But that
doesn't make it any less pseudoscience.

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lsaferite
Well, it also unfortunately damages the liver. I know this because the
military would hand out bottles of 1g pills like candy for every possible
ailment you came to them with.

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huxley
I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR PHARMACIST, but liver damage is more often caused by
acetaminophen, it is quite rare with ibuprofen which tends to be associated
with gastrointestinal bleeding or in extreme cases kidney damage (however
ibuprofen is not as likely as other NSAIDs like Naproxen to cause kidney
damage or failure)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Adverse_effects](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Adverse_effects)

Update: 1G pills mentioned by parent may be children's dosage of acetaminophen
[http://www.drugs.com/imprints/1g-17321.html](http://www.drugs.com/imprints/1g-17321.html)

~~~
lsaferite
No, I'm sure they were Ibuprofen.

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reasonattlm
Paper:

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004860](http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004860)

Every few years a new hot thing emerges in the field of drug candidates to
slow aging. It was sirtuins for a while and then rapamycin and there will be
others in due course. This happens because it is very possible to raise
funding, start a company, and make a lot of money from this sort of thing even
if - as is always the case to date - nothing of significance ever comes of it
in terms of treatments that can actually extend life. As I've said in the
past, this all seems like a really great cover story for the real scientific
goal of amassing detailed data on the operation of cellular metabolism. The
stated goals of slowing aging serve to draw in investment that would otherwise
be hard to find at the needed levels: metabolism is ferociously complex, and
trying to map it is chewing up billions of dollars. This is work that should
be done, and the faster the better, but I think it disingenuous to talk of any
real possibility that significant human life extension can result from it in
the next few decades.

For real progress in treating aging an entirely different direction in
scientific strategy is needed. Not mining the natural world for drug
candidates that might slow down aging in poorly understood ways by altering
poorly understood metabolic mechanisms, but rather deliberately aimed efforts
to repair the known and comparatively well understood forms of damage that
cause aging. We can bypass the need for a full and detailed understanding of
how this damage interacts with every part of our metabolism to cause aging by
taking the well validated and time-proven list of fundamental differences
between old tissue and young tissue - a list of forms of cellular and
molecular damage - and then repairing those differences. There is even a
detailed set of research plans leading to treatments that can achieve this
goal, which is a very large departure from the world of slowing aging through
metabolic manipulation, where there is no plan to speak of and nowhere near
enough knowledge to create one.

This is not even to mention the fact that slowing down damage accumulation can
never be as good as repairing damage in terms of benefits delivered, and
slowing further damage can do very little for old people who are already very
damaged. The old need repair, and repair as a strategy is simply better
overall in any case. It continues to amaze me that the clearly far worse, far
more expensive, far less understood approach to treating aging is the one that
dominates in this small research community.

In any case, every time a new overhyped drug candidate to slow aging emerges
people get excited about it. Short memories, if you ask me. But the next time
that someone you know in the community becomes fired up about early stage
development of an age-slowing drug candidate that extends life in animal
studies you can offer some needed perspective by saying "but so does
ibuprofen." And what does ibuprofen do for life span in humans? Nothing
meaningful enough to show up in five decades of trials, studies, and worldwide
usage.

The goal of taking decades and billions to add just a few years to adult life
expectancy doesn't fill me with glee. If that much time and money are to be
expended, and I am to become old waiting, I want far better expected outcomes
for success: decades of healthy life and rejuvenation, not pills to very
slightly slow down the remaining decline. Fund research into repair
biotechnologies after the SENS model, not the same old drug development
programs that gave us a better knowledge of sirtuins and little else.

