
Drug cocktail almost doubles lifespan of worms - LinuxBender
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181022122926.htm
======
reasonattlm
This is not all that important, save as a commentary on the fact that
combinational treatments are not well explored in the research community. This
is true throughout medicine, and not localized to aging research.

Why not all that important?

1) The current record for nematode life extension - without extending the
dauer stage indefinitely, an approach that has no analogue in higher species -
is a tenfold extension of life.

2) Stress response upregulation of the sort accomplished here has outcomes
that diminish as species life span increases. Where we can compare directly,
calorie restriction and growth hormone knockout, the result in humans is
constrained to be no more than a few years of additional life. Anything larger
would already have shown up in the data.

So why is it that the research and development community don't undertake
combinatorial treatments to any significant degree? I blame regulation and
intellectual property law. Those items combine to make it much harder to find
and deploy potentially synergistic therapies than to just go and work on some
new single therapy. Thus there is much more work on new single therapies than
one finding combinations of existing therapies that might do much better than
either on its own.

~~~
JamesBarney
With regards to number 1, I think it's interesting to differentiate between
genetic, and drug induced changes to lifespan. If only for the reason it's too
late to genetically engineer me :).

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narrator
C60 doubles lifespan in rats[1]. Ho hum. Can't patent it and it's a cheap
synthetic so guess we'll just forget about that one. I read a lot of medical
research and I find stuff like this all the time.

That nobody cares is proof that if there's no money or ability to politically
influence by reporting it, nobody will ever find out about it. Things are
brought to the surface by coordinated action, either political or economic.
Everything else stays buried largely because there's simply too much stuff to
look at and it takes concerted efforts to bring things to peoples attention.
Political propaganda and advertising are multi-billion dollar industries for a
reason.

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22498298](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22498298)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
[http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/03/olive-oil-
fullerene-a...](http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/03/olive-oil-fullerene-
and-lifespan.html#)

------
giardini
What drugs specifically are in the "cocktail"?

I could not access the paywalled paper. Gratefully fanzhang answered my
question below:

fanzhang:> _The paper says: Metformin, Psora-4, Rapamycin, Rifampicin, and
Allantoin._

Here's a 2017 article w/o paywall which identified the five drugs above and
also the best combinations (for worms) at that time:

 _" Rapamycin,rifampicin, Psora-4 cocktail doubles lifespan":_

[https://alivebynature.com/rapamycinrifampicin-
psora-4-cockta...](https://alivebynature.com/rapamycinrifampicin-
psora-4-cocktail-doubles-lifespan/)

The article states that the most successful one(at that time) was rapamycin +
rifampicin + allantoin, resulting in a doubling of mean lifespan.

~~~
BurningFrog
Ah yes, Metformin is strongly believed to extend human life span. I've been
thinking about asking my doctor for a prescription.

~~~
onetimemanytime
This makes sense. Glucose at above certain levels ruins cells, so Metformin
lowers the glucose level. Asking the doc is key, you can't just read an
article and try to find 4-5 meds to take each day :)

~~~
cgh
You can also eat a very low-carb diet. Restricting your carbs to foods like
greens and berries will have the same effect without the need for a
prescription. Gluconeogenesis is demand-driven.

Of course, in the context of anti-aging, Metformin may have other beneficial
effects outside of moderating glucose levels.

~~~
village-idiot
Fasting is also a good idea. It forces your body to kill off marginal cells
for food, rather than leaving them to potentially become cancer.

~~~
_Schizotypy
Can you cite a source please? I would be very interested in reading it

~~~
sushid
Not the parent but try searching online for fasting and autophagy. There are
countless sources regarding this link.

Another good recent study is the intestinal stem cell regenerative boost after
a 24 hour fast in mice.

One might say that the links are still not solid, but we do know that lowering
glucose levels might be a good idea (hence the interest in metformin) and
fasting/keto certainly achieves that without a drug.

------
MAXPOOL
Sean Carrol has a interesting podcast episode (and transcript) related to this
type of research for those who are interested.

Episode 16: Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future:
[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/10/01/epis...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/10/01/episode-16-coleen-
murphy-on-aging-biology-and-the-future/)

> Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it.
> Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her
> team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to
> extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take
> place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have
> learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects — or
> curing it altogether? — even in human beings.

~~~
krzat
Even more impressive is that those worms have exactly 302 neurons. And it's
enough for everything, including some kind of primitive memory.

~~~
MAXPOOL
Only 100 of those are sensory neurons.

Only two neurons are for memory (interneurons as the neural substrates of
mechanosensory memory).

------
manor
Worms...

Cut their balls off, they live longer [1] Starve them, they live longer [2]

Any volunteers?

[1]
[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(06)00237-6](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(06\)00237-6)
[2]
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1474-9726...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2006.00238.x)

~~~
noobly
Starving seems to work for a lot of different critters, us included.

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vibrio
Does anyone know if C. Elegans get cancer? Not that I'm concerned about the
prevention of cancer as a mechanism to prolonging life in this study, but I
would consider potential unintended consequences in mucking with these
signaling and immune pathways. It still seems to be an interesting finding.

~~~
ryanmercer
>Does anyone know if C. Elegans get cancer?

I don't, however C. Elegans has an average lifespan around 2–3 WEEKS.

That doesn't give them a whole lot of time to be exposed to damage from
umpteen sources of radiation, environmental pollutants, stress, etc unlike
humans that live 7 decades (the current worldwide life expectancy is 70.5
years) which is more than 400 times longer.

------
tastyham
Sweet, I've always wished my worms would live longer!

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amarant
exciting! between this and that blood-from-young-people therapy that was on
here not so long ago, it seems we can expect older and older people to be
productive in the future :) I realize I'm selling my own pension here, but I
think it's a good thing. perhaps I can have shorter work-weeks after 60 or
something?

~~~
lalaithion
If you save 15% of your (post-tax) income every year for 43 years, you can
live off of market investment returns for essentially forever. Assuming you
started working at 22, that's a retirement age of 65 with no government
assistance.

~~~
baccheion
How did you arrive at this number? Based on my calculations, it will take 50
years of saving 20% of take-home into an inflation-offsetting account to be
able to retire. It's assumed a house is purchased separately. If the fabled 8%
YoY over and above inflation isn't available at retirement, the final amount
lasts about ~20 years.

------
mrpoptart
Here's the abstract:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30269951](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30269951)

And here's the paywalled paper:
[https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1534-5807(18)3...](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1534-5807\(18\)30699-3)

------
noobly
A good day to be a worm.

------
buboard
so i will have to pay all those pills for life to live 3 weeks longer ...
hmmmm ...

------
andrew_
I for one welcome our new invertebrate overlords.

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EwanG
And somehow the actual drugs being used are not mentioned. I get the concept
is to identify pathways and then find similar pathways in humans, but still...

~~~
fanzhang
The paper says: Metformin, Psora-4, Rapamycin, Rifampicin, and Allantoin.

I don't recommend humans just take this cocktail. I imagine the paper
combinatorially tried a ton of different chemicals and this set happened to
work well.

In humans: Metfomrin has been used on human studies of life extension.
Rapamycin is an immunosupressant in humans. Rifamycin is an antibiotic.
Allantoin and Psora-4 are not recognized by the FDA as common human
medications.

Seems like a common thread for the human-medication subset is anti-
inflammation.

------
ryanmercer
Meh, so does caloric restriction (even in numerous mammals like rhesus
macaques) but it doesn't appear to remotely have a comparable effect in
humans.

Even if it did translate to humans ok you might live lonver but what about
your mental health, what about your memory, what about your joints, what about
your vision?

I'd rather die at 40, 50 or 60 than die at 150 blind as a bat unsure of who I
am or where I am 23 hours of the day being pulled around in some sort of
neutral buoyancy contraption that keeps me from getting bedsores because my
joints are so deteriorated even standing is quite painful.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Why do people still use this argument?

Every single proponent and scientist working on longetivity aims at increasing
the life quality also, along with lifespan. It's an obvious thing to do and to
aim for, and everyone seriously working in the field does this already. They
are not looking to make humans live 150 years at the 80-year-old life quality,
they are looking to expand and extend the life quality, so that the same
quality at 40, 50, 60 years etc - to last for longer, thus extending the
overall range as well...

~~~
ryanmercer
>Every single proponent and scientist working on longetivity aims at
increasing the life quality also,

Maybe because zero progress has been made in regards to cognitive decline,
vision preservation/restoration and retarding or reversing joint
deterioration?

Just a hunch...

Worldwide life expectancy is 1.48 times what it was in 1950 and yet:

\- Cancer rates have experienced a 6% (Leukemia) to 183% (Multiple Myeloma)
since 1950

\- 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 65 has Alzheimer’s.

\- According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use
some sort of vision correction

\- For women, they can start to show signs of joint pain due to aging after
age 50, while men are likely to see it before age 45

\- Roughly 7 million people in the United States are living with a total hip
or knee replacement. Continuing pain is common.

So cool, some worms live an extra 2-3 weeks and have infinitely less exposure
to UV radiation, wholly lack joints, have incredibly simpler brains, live
orders of magnitude less to be exposed to random radiation and countless
compounds that can cause genetic mutations and damage, experiences orders of
magnitude less environmental stress over their lifespan etc.

~~~
tastyham
Human lifespan hasn't increased very much. Life expectancy at birth has
increased significantly due to reductions in childhood disease and accidental
death, but life expectancy at 50 and 60 have barely moved over the last 100
years. People have a much higher chance of making it to old age, but all the
issues you cited will still hit them once they get there.

~~~
philipkglass
From 1918 to 2018, remaining life expectancy at age 60 in the United States
has increased 44% for men and 52% for women.

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html)

