One Pill Makes You Younger…

Is there – could there be – an anti-aging pill?

I write about the hope and hype of “anti-aging” – and by anti-aging, you know I mean prolonging (and enjoying) a healthy, vibrant, engaged and meaningful life for as long as possible. Most times there’s a whiff of hope and a shitload of hype. Most times there’s a sliver of interesting or provocative research that morphs overnight into products and treatments shilled by internet hucksters. Hope becomes hype in a heartbeat.

But this may be changing.

One of the big problems in the world of anti-aging – that is, the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around the evolving science of aging – is the lack of substantial, credible research. I am not talking about research that investigates how we age. That’s coming along nicely, and as you know from reading this blog, the news is very good. And I’m not talking about the research that explores connections between our bad habits (smoking, sedentary lifestyle, stress, diet) or our good habits (exercise, diet, sleep) and aging. We are getting excellent, thought-provoking data on that. Again, I’ve written about this quite a bit here.

I am talking about credible research on “remedies,” those substances (from HGH to CoQ-10, bio-identical hormones to resveratrol) hawked in books or on the web that promise to stop aging in its tracks, turn back the hands of time and cure what ails ya.

When you look for the research to back up the claims and promises, you don’t find it. The gold-standard studies (large scale, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled) are not there. The reasons for this are interesting and complicated – too complicated to write about here. (I do, however, explain this in my book, Counterclockwise). But there is change in the air.

Doctors and scientists want drug regulators and research funding agencies to consider medicines that delay age-related disease as legitimate drugs. Such treatments have a physiological basis, researchers say, and could extend a person’s healthy years by slowing down the processes that underlie common diseases of aging — making them worthy of government approval. (And government – that is, FDA – approval depends on consistent evidence gleaned from large-scale, gold-standard studies.) Please know that I know that some horrific drugs have been approved by the FDA, and some potentially life-saving ones have not. This is not a perfect system.

The first drug scientists would like to subject to rigorous gold-standard research is metformin, which suppresses glucose production by the liver and increases sensitivity to insulin. The drug has been used for more than 60 years (in the treatment of diabetes). It is safe and prolongs healthy life and lifespan in worms and in some mouse strains. Data also suggest that it could delay heart disease, cancer, cognitive decline and death in people with diabetes. There are plans for a 5-7 year study involving several thousand people at 15 research centers around the country.

And who knows, in the next decade there might well be an anti-aging pill.