Could a medicine used to treat a type of diabetes be the anti-ageing drug mankind has been searching for down the ages?
From the winter of 2016, a campaign titled Targeting Ageing with Metformin will begin for which scientists are raising funds and recruiting around 3,000 people in the age group of 70 to 80 years. All of them would have to be suffering from or at risk from cancer, heart disease or dementia, reports the Telegraph .
What are scientists going to investigate? Whether the drug slows the ageing process, stops disease and can be used to extend the lifespan of an average human being, says the report.
The trial is expected to take five to seven years.
What is metformin?
According to the US National Library of Medicine: “Metformin is used alone or with other medications, including insulin, to treat type 2 diabetes (condition in which the body does not use insulin normally and, therefore, cannot control the amount of sugar in the blood)”
An ANI report says the US Food and Drug Administration has given the approval for the trial given researchers have found that the drug extends the life of animals.
Last year, researchers at Cardiff University had discovered that diabetes patients who were given this drug lived longer than even those who didn’t have the condition, says a Daily Mail report .
So how does the drug slow ageing?
Metformin increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a call, which seems to boost its longevity and its robustness, says a Huffington Post report .
This in turn helps slow ageing and therefore the side effects of ageing such as heart disease.
“If you target an aging process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well,” Prof. Gordon Lithgow from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California was quoted as saying in the ANI report.