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Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

scienceblog.com

121–130 of 176 posts

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#121

What's striking about "anti-ageing" research is how it keeps circling back to the same boring truths: don’t smoke, keep your weight down, move often, sleep properly, keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, and go easy on the booze. If something makes an overweight, sedentary smoker hit 100, then it’s a miracle drug. Please let me know if/when you've seen that drug...

You missed the most important one, strong social connections. Maybe smoking might beat it out, but otherwise make sure you have a strong social network if you want to live longer (and with better quality of life).

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#122
post #20

> Fast for short intervals regularly, and longer fasts as they feel good to you. You can effectively do this every day if you just eat once per day. When I was properly obese, this technique resulted in rapid weight loss. Zero exercise was required to see results, which was good at the time because the not eating part was about all I could handle. Being in a fasted state is as close as you can get to actually reversi…

Latest research (as in only ~2m old) dispels that narrative a bit but not entirely. Looks like spermidine is the autophagy signal but they’re not sure fasting does t always increase spermidine Also…lifting light weights for like 10 minutes a day at home is a lifechanger in the early days

What do you mean by 'the early days' ? And how is it a life changer?

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#123

These articles really need a lot of context to parse as they paint some of the compounds as having potential upside without downsides. Metformin is amazing in people with diabetes, but among non-diabetics taking it for vague life extension claims it’s often discontinued due to side effects. Rapamycin has fallen out of favor among many in this space because they felt it was producing net negative effects as well as ca…

What side effects cause people taking Metformin to discontinue it? I'm taking, but haven't noticed any, but... you don't notice your baseline, I suppose!

Nausea

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#124

How many people can really even afford life extension? As in living all the way into 90s or 100? Your retirement savings have to be pretty solid to enjoy those extra years. It’s not like before, the game has changed.

A better question might be can we afford NOT to have life extension? Advanced economies all over the world are filling up with sick, elderly people who form a massive drain on the economy, and it's going to get much worse. Developing medical technologies that can keep them healthier and productive for longer is the one thing that can save us here.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#125
post #23

A lot of people in the comments are talking about the "problem" of death and approaches to take, but really, the only thing you can do is philosophically make your peace. Anything else at this point is yelling into infinity.

Realistically you can maybe get another couple year from what I can tell. Is it worth it? I'd focus more on qulalitiy of your life. not everyone will die of something all these can help with, the obese person I used to know enjoyed eating - and we can now say in hindsight that diet changes would not have helped him live longer.

leading a healthy active lifestyle DOES improve the quality of your life.

Getting diabetes and injecting yourself daily with insulin is not a quality life.

Having trouble walking or playing with your grandkids because one is too fat and has ruined their joints is also not quality.

Having a miserable last 10-20 years of life due to a stroke is also not quality.

These things don’t mysteriously happen. :) Being able to take care of yourself into old age is the biggest gift you can give yourself. Why? It reduces your suffering as much as possible. But nothing is guaranteed of course.

Personal story time…growing up my parents barely valued their health. Mom and dad were fat for years. My dad had a stroke at 65 and he’s struggling with symptoms 10 years later. My mom got seriously ill at 60 from years of mismanaged diabetes, and was in and out of the hospital for 3 years before dying of a heart attack. She ate a lot of cookies though - quality life achieved?

In contrast my in laws walk 10k+ steps daily, eat healthy, and exercise. They’ve been doing it for years. They are almost 70, travel all the time, and keep up with their grand kids no problem! They themselves are doing better than their parents, who suffered from early onset dementia and high blood pressure.

Just my opinions as someone that’s seen 2 very different approaches to “living”. I try not to obsess over it, but i certainly make sure my BMI is low and make sure my blood sugar is excellent. I’ll do anything to avoid going through what my parents did. I plan to enjoy my 60s and 70s!

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#126
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taurine and Vitamin E are readily available and seem prudent. For melatonin, tryptophan plus niacin would maximize the serotonin pathway (note this is dangerous when used with SSRIs). How many of these are easily available? I had no idea that royal jelly is sold as a supplement.

Of the prescription options, estradiol is probably the most common and easily available, between hormonal birth control and HRT. It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis. Despite this…

Estradiol isn’t very well studied. It may be used for a few years in menopause, only in rare cases off-label, otherwise. Scientific and commercial interest seems pretty non existent. Probably because patentable synthetic derivatives historically fared worse risk-wise, than bioidentical estrogens, and the market outside of menopause issues is too small. Research on trans people, who would make interesting study subjects for hormonal matters, just got outlawed in the US.

Hormonal contraceptives typically do not contain estradiol, but ethinylestradiol and/or progestins.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#127
post #75

There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway. But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake o…

If we really manage to crack the code on aging, How certain are we that it's merely something to be delayed? Apparent age is at least somewhat reversible via lifestyle factors e.g. diet/exercise/sobriety.

I presume, death by accident becomes a statistical certainty rather quickly.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#128
post #20

> Fast for short intervals regularly, and longer fasts as they feel good to you. You can effectively do this every day if you just eat once per day. When I was properly obese, this technique resulted in rapid weight loss. Zero exercise was required to see results, which was good at the time because the not eating part was about all I could handle. Being in a fasted state is as close as you can get to actually reversi…

You are overstating the benefits of fasting. While it can be an effective weight loss strategy for some people, for those of us at a healthy weight there is no reliable evidence that it will improve lifespan compared to eating the same nutrients spread out across multiple meals.

I'm a large man and fairly active so I have to consume ~3000 kcal/day to maintain weight. If I try to eat that much in one meal it will make me physically sick. My digestive system just can't handle that much in one bolus.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the prescription options, estradiol is probably the most common and easily available, between hormonal birth control and HRT. It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis. Despite this…

Estradiol isn’t very well studied. It may be used for a few years in menopause, only in rare cases off-label, otherwise. Scientific and commercial interest seems pretty non existent. Probably because patentable synthetic derivatives historically fared worse risk-wise, than bioidentical estrogens, and the market outside of menopause issues is too small. Research on trans people, who would make interesting study subjec…

I was going to note that a relatively large sample group has been taking estradiol en masse for many years, but you rightly called out that studying trans folks is now forbidden in the US. A shame, we could have offered up quite a bit of knowledge on it.
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