Post: #1

Do any of you have experience with taking metformin or rapamycin for life extension?

I don't expect posts claiming that you've lived 20 years longer or retarded aging, obviously. I would like to know if any of you had dosing recommendations, side effects to be concerned about, etc.

Feel free to PM me if you'd rather keep this sort of discussion private. I can summarize and share whatever you send me.

Post: #2

Strong username to post content correlation.

Post: #3

I've had a lot of patients refuse metformin because of the diarrhoea it can cause.

Anyway, my diabetics on metformin still grow old and die.

Bear in mind that life extension does not necessarily mean ageing-suppression.

Would you be willing to live 20 extra years, if it meant living in an old age home?

With old, decrepit, old-age patients I'll sometimes deliberately NOT check the cholesterol levels, for example. Because if they turn out to be high, I will then be put in an ethical quandary - do I give them cholesterol meds and therefore extend their rather poor quality lives at any cost or do I let them gently fade into the night?

Currently, I think the best scientific evidence for life extension is probably for the cholesterol drugs. Start taking them today and you can die at 120, toothless and weak and depressed surrrounded by the ugly puke-yellow walls of your old age home, instead of dying on a camping trip in your late 70's.

For everything there must be a price.

Personally, I generally recommend via negativa (in other words, cutting stuff out) strategies for people who want to live healthy, long lives (not that I've lived a long life myself, but I've observed, as a doctor, what makes them short, so maybe I'm on to something
- Anything in excess is toxic. Sugar, in our current dietary culture, is too much. You shouldn't have more than 3-4 teaspoons of sugar a day. A can of coke has 7. I've seen miracles happen in patients who cut out sugar - cholesterol levels drop, blood pressures drop, energy and happiness levels rise. The stuff is poison. Just cutting out sugared drinks, even without cutting out any other dietary sugars, causes improvement.
- Don't smoke. It's much harder to die as a non-smoker.
- Don't drink alcohol, or at least don't drink to drunkenness. Alcohol is toxic.
- Don't watch TV. It's really hard to be sedentary if you don't watch TV. Out of sheer boredom, people end up taking walks.
- Don't play video games, for similar reasons to the TV thing.
- Don't work too hard
- Don't lazy too hard either
- Don't eat refined foods. Food should come from a farm, not a factory. By refined foods I also include pills and powders. There is nothing natural about a multivitamin. If multivitamins were natural, you could go down to the vitamin farm and pick vitamin bottles off the vitamin tree. With all those vitamins are weird ingredients like titanium dioxide and silicon and other chemicals which may do more harm than good. Besides, regular vitamins might feed cancers and infections, making you more ill.
- Don't expose yourself to weird chemicals in general. Do you really need some super duper chemical cocktail deodorant when baking soda does the trick? Do you need chemicals to clean your home when a little soap and vinegar solution works well? Cleaners have higher rates of cancer and illness for a reason - it's the constant exposure to random chemicals.


I'll add more to the above if I think of extra stuff. Anyway, I'm only a doctor, so what do I know, right? The above advice works best on people who are already sick (I see mostly sick people, after all). For people who are already healthy, like most Rooshers, the above advice might not be relevant.

But yeah, remember to be careful what you wish for. I remember some Greek story about a guy who wished to the gods that he would never die, so the gods granted his wish but he never stopped aging.

Sorry for the random rambling. Do carry on with the thread topic, it's interesting.

Post: #4

Thomas the Rhymer, angel of death. May they rest in peace.

Post: #5

Side effects of metformin are diarrhoea, lactic acidosis (extremely rare, don't have to worry about it), and fat loss. Supposedly also lowers testosterone. Start off with 500mg daily, working up to 2g.

I have no idea about rapamycin, but an article just came out giving good anecdotal evidence that it improves the lives of old dogs.

And Thomas is right, it's much more about the quality of life that you have and not the length. What we want is to severely slow or reverse aging, not extend out our twilight years by 10 years, during which time we're not really enjoying the full essence of life. None of these drugs appear to severely slow our aging, so if I were you, I'd follow most of his advice*.

* I don't know why he went on a rant about toxic chemicals when these have been proved to be safe in humans and are watched like a hawk by the FDA. If you're using Windex once in a while or Degree deodorant, it's not going to shorten your life span.

Also, Thomas does not directly mention exercise, of which aerobic and anaerobic are very beneficial to quality of life. Lastly, you can start taking a baby aspirin starting at the age of 50 to reduce all-cause mortality. You need to take it for at least five years in order to start gaining some of the benefits.

Post: #6

Yeah plenty of low-hanging fruit before you get on the drugs.

Sleep, diet, stress reduction, intermittent/periodic fasting.

Hell just cutting out sugar improves your skin "age" by several years.

The way I see it:

Do the natural stuff now and slow progression as much as poss... then in 20 years you're still young and can maybe jump on the then well-verified medical stuff

Post: #7

I just listened to this great Peter Attia podcast with David A. Sinclair, Ph.D., (a Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging). :

https://peterattiamd.com/davidsinclair/

Sinclair takes daily :

NMN (750 mg)
Resveratrol (1,000 mg)
Metformin (1,500 mg)

Post: #8

The best part of the podcast was at the end when he hinted that he may have made a breakthrough with Sirtuin 2 and NMN. But I'm a little bit older and remember Sinclair as being a little bit of a marketer for resveratrol 12 years ago, which got him a lot of cash by selling his crap company to Gilead. It turns out, however, that the dude was not right, so I'm taking his announcements with a grain of salt.

Sinclair's explanation of why we age is also fascinating (we're a perfectly preserved lossless CD where the information is getting harder to read over time) and is quite different from others' opinions, i.e., our DNA is being damaged all the time or aging is actually encoded in our DNA.

Post: #9

(12-14-2018 02:26 PM)PUA_Rachacha Wrote:  The best part of the podcast was at the end when he hinted that he may have made a breakthrough with Sirtuin 2 and NMN. But I'm a little bit older and can remember Sinclair as being a little bit of a marketer for resveratrol 12 years ago, which got him a lot of cash by selling his crap company to GSK. It turns out, however, that the dude's product didn't pan out and GSK completely wrote off his company, so I'm now taking Sinclair's pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Sinclair's explanation of why we age is fascinating (we're a perfectly preserved lossless CD where the information is getting harder to read over time) and is quite different from others' opinions, i.e., our DNA is being damaged all the time or aging is actually encoded in our DNA.

Post: #10

Great podcast with Nir Barzilai on the many benefits of taking Metformin. He is the director of the Institute for Aging Research and expert in the genetics of longevity.

https://peterattiamd.com/nirbarzilai/

From the notes :

Nir also recently spoke at the Vatican (and followed a speech by Joe Biden and The Pope)

During the Pope’s speech, he says “I still hope there’ll be one, little pill, cheap, for everyone in the world that will cure whatever cancer they have.”

Nir gets up and is like, “Well, there is actually a cheap pill like that and I don’t know if it cures any cancer in the world but it can prevent a lot of the cancers in the world. Actually, it has a side effect that it also can prevent a lot of other diseases in the world.”

Post: #11

To all the MDs - Do you have anymore data on Metformin with your non-diabetic patients?

Post: #12

There has been increased interest in this medication in the fitness community, especially with new research showing its benefits.

Metformin offers some appetite suppression which may lead to weight loss. (The degree of effects depends on the individual.)

Its fairly safe and side effect free for a healthy person. The diarrhea side effect will subside with time and is not noticeable if you start the drug at a low dose and slowly increase (ex 1/4 of a 500mg tablet, then slowly go up).

Does it really extend human lifespan?
Yes, for diabetics.

Non-diabetics?
Not enough data yet, theoretically its possible.
There is a 3,000 person clinical trial looking at its effects on aging starting soon.


some more info:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/hea...ging-pill/