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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...
I too would be interested in this. The drugs mentioned are specific to worms. What would work in humans, without negative side effects?

There must be a forum out there with scientists and biohackers that document their findings and process without fear of legal fallout. Maybe there is a Tor hidden site?

Well yeah, because that would be revealing their secrets - if they're using off-the-shelf products then it's too easy. They want to first lock down the patents and rights on this so they can make money off of it.

Which is fair of course, they put the effort in.

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.

(comment deleted)
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?
Humans != worms

(well, ignoring the figurative worms, who were not in this study)

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.
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.
Oh no, don't promote tech like this until you're retired yourself - THEN you can vote for this kind of tech to make the generation then supporting you and your retirement work longer!

(that's what's happening in Europe with the age of retirement being raised left and right. I mean it's just in e.g. Greece but where I live it's gone up by 2 years because there's a slightly older generation that are now all retiring, and the system is based on growth - that is, a younger generation paying for the retirement of the older one - instead of on saving, which causes the system to collapse unless they make people work longer.

On an aggregate scale it doesn't make sense to talk about a system based on "saving". You can't eat money in retirement.

So retirees are always extracting some fraction of the productive output of current labor. This fraction can go up or down depending on the economic growth rate and expectation of standard of living of retirees.

The only solution is for nation states to invest pension funds in technology and innovation so that you're not on the hook for fiat decades in the future to support the elderly.

Social Security in the US has lent ~$2.6-2.9 trillion from its trust fund to the US government; imagine if that had been spent on driving down the cost of caring for the elderly instead of frivolous wars and tax cuts. You can't save up for the future to pay for expenses you can't predict; you have to invest today's dollars in getting ahead of the curve, to drastically drive down the cost of future predicted services you'll need to provide.

TL;DR Invest resources today to ensure a steep cost decline curve for existing in the future.

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...

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

The drugs are clearly listed in the paper, as has been mentioned here in the comments already.
Did you read the article?

"The drug rapamycin is currently administered following organ transplants to prevent the body's immune system from rejecting the transplanted organs, but previous experiments by other research groups showed that it extends the lifespan of many organisms, including the C. elegans worms, fruit flies and mice"

Dr Gruber's team administered combinations of two or three compounds targeting different ageing pathways to C. elegans (worms).

I'm not a biologist, but wouldn't an immunosuppressant's "life prolonging" effects be negated in a non-petri-dish-environment by bacterial, viral and fungal infections to the recepient?
You provided some understanding from the article, which is appreciated.

As a friendly reminder, the guidelines state: “Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."”

Why would you think that the question immediately implies an insinuation? It is a perfectly normal question to ask based on data. Article gives info. First comment (now no longer the top comment) asks question on info, response from person who read the article - did you read the article? It is logical to me, I don't think there was any insinuation here, just asking for verification. Simple as that :)

A better question in the first place would be - I read the article but am unable to figure out which are the drugs actually used as I do not have much background in Bio/Pharma science

> Why would you think that the question immediately implies an insinuation?

This may be culture-dependent, but I guess most people would feel it that way.

In my experience, the question is stronger than an insinuation, coming across as an accusation.
This is an issue with text conversation exchange. We do not have information on the tone of voice. And it is unfair to imagine a tone based on what we read
Ah yes, Metformin is strongly believed to extend human life span. I've been thinking about asking my doctor for a prescription.
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 :)
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.

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

Oh, that's a cute concrete theory I've never heard before.

I do fast occasionally, but not as often as I'd wish.

If you want to learn more, the biological process is called “autophagy”.
Yeah, but taking a pill and eating what you want (more or less) is much better
Please ask and report back as a data point! I obtain Metformin through non-traditional channels, as I don't have a PCP and Walgreens/CVS aren't able to prescribe it off label. Life would be easier if it could just end up in my mailbox once a month/every three months.
Alldaychemist.com can do just that. I’ve found them quite reliable and certainly better than your normal pharmacy experience if you can wait on the package to arrive from India.
I've been trying Berberine, which controls blood glucose effectively at 1000-1500mg per day doses.
That's in Goldenseal, which I've never heard of having an anti-ageing effect.
Selegiline has also been associated with increased lifespan. I sometimes wonder if vitamin D's effect on blood sugar is comparable to metformin.
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.

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...

>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.

Most research in life extension is based on reducing the incremental damage caused by radiation, stress, toxins etc. so they will increase the duration of youth and middle age as well as feeble old age.

I think a lot of the real world gains in life span are coming from entirely different things though, like treating and preventing heart attacks and cancer. This does end up extending the "old" part of our lives.

Well, somebody has to care enough to further the research.

If the human population was serious about quality-of-life improvement, they would eat healthy and exercise. But they don't. Most people in this forum don't.

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.
It seems like there are two approaches to trying to increase the healthspan of individuals. One is wait for the body to fail and try to correct it. This is 99.9% of all research funding. The other is trying to coerce the body into failing more slowly and less often(.1% of funding).

It seems weird to criticize the second approach because the first approach has made so much more progress extending lifespan than healthspan.

> I'd rather die at 40

You won't think so when you turn 40.

I'm 33, I very much came close to death a handful of years ago when my potassium levels were low enough I was paralyzed and my heart was struggling to beat. Quite convinced I was in my final moments with "well shit, this is how it ends" running in a loop in my mind as I shouted for help, as I was manhandled onto a stretcher, as I was terrified in an ambulance as it took turns and I had no ability to brace myself, as I was manhandled onto an ER bed, as I lay in the ER bed unable to scratch my nose, unable to sign my name, unable to turn my head to see what the nurses were doing. I was quite certain I was on my way out of this world until I felt the burn of that IV potassium raging through my veins. I have zero desire to ever be old and decrepit, to lose any worthwhile ability to care/provide for myself, to ever begin to lose my memories. ( see: https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2013/2/19/flashback... )

I watched my father's quality of life tank drastically when I was 12 before he died of cancer.

I've watched my mother that's now in her mid 60's deteriorate rapidly in just the past decade after getting thyroid dancer, developing semi-rapid bone deterioration, COPD and type II diabetes.

My father's father fell off of the first step of a ladder and died a few days later as a result.

My mother's father is in his late 80's and has severely been suffering from dementia the past several years. His wife died a few months ago having been on oxygen for over a decade and herself experiencing advanced dementia at the end.

I stand by what I said, I'd rather go out at 40 than spend a few, or several, decades miserable.

If you look at most people in the 100's they had a far higher quality of life in there 50s/60s/70s than people who died in their 70s/80s. So I think the dichotomy you're presenting is a false one.
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.

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 :).
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.
>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.

C. Elegans can develop tumors, but only in the germ line (gamete-producing) cells, which are the only stem cells. There are no adult somatic stem cells, i.e. no ability for repair, so no mechanism for cancer growth in the body.

That said, many of the pathways that are central to mammalian cancers are there in C. Elegans, which still makes it a valuable model organism for cancer research.

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

> 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.

Even more impressive is that those worms have exactly 302 neurons. And it's enough for everything, including some kind of primitive memory.
Only 100 of those are sensory neurons.

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

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

so i will have to pay all those pills for life to live 3 weeks longer ... hmmmm ...
A good day to be a worm.
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