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Human trial of anti-ageing drug to prolong life until 120 years

Metformin, a drug prescribed to diabetics, could possibly be the key for longer human life. The US Food and Drug Administration just gave last week its approval for a human trial to begin in 2016.

Belgian researchers from Cardiff University have proof that metformin extends the life of animals so now scientists want to replicate the trials using humans. They tested metformin on C. elegans, tiny roundworms, reports The Telegraph.

They observed that the worms aged slower, became healthier and did not develop wrinkles. When the same drug, the most prescribed diabetes medication, was tested on mice, the lifespan of the rodent extended by almost 40 percent and developed stronger bones. And diabetics who took metformin regularly lived longer than non-diabetics by about an average of eight years.

To make the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial possible, scientists are recruiting 3,000 seniors who are between 70 and 80 years old and have cancer, cardio ailments and dementia, or are at risk of acquiring those incurable ailments. Dr Jay Olshanky, from the University of Illinois Chicago, spearheaded the new study, discussed on “Breakthrough,” a National Geographic documentary.

He says that by slowing ageing in humans, even by just a little, people could live longer and feel young. Its implication is that people would not die of old age when they reach their 70s, 80s or 90s but possibly live until they reach 110 or 120, without the ailments that accompany those difficult years.

Olshanky says it “would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era” to slow ageing which scientists say in not an inevitable part of life since cells have a DNA blueprint that could keep a body functioning forever, like some marine creatures.

For that to happen, billions of cell divisions in the body must happen to keep the body functioning correctly. However, the more times that cells have to divide, the more chances of errors are also there, preventing the repair of the damage.

In cancer patients, their cells lack the ability to get rid of mutations which lead to growth of tumours. In Alzheimer’s, the patient’s brain could no longer clear sticky plaques, leading to the development of dementia. The number of oxygen molecules are increased by metformin which is released into a cell and boosts robustness and longevity.

According to WebMD, metformin is prescribed to type 2 diabetics to help control blood sugar and prevent damage to kidney, blindness, nerve problems and loss of limbs and sexual functions. It also lessens risk of heart attack or stroke.

From International Business Times @ http://www.ibtimes.com.au/us-fda-gives-ok-human-trial-metformin-anti-ageing-drug-prolong-life-until-120-years-1488127

Metformin: A prescription for longevity?

Maria de Jesus looks at the candles on her birthday cake as she celebrates her 113th birthday in the village of Corujo, near Tomar in central Portugal September 10, 2006. Maria is the oldest person in Europe, according to the U.S. Gerontology Research Group. Reuters/Marcos Borga

by: Dan Stickler

How much of an impact does curing age related diseases have on longevity? What if we could cure cancer and heart disease? Let’s imagine that we cured all major diseases; heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, etc. What would we gain? The answers might surprise you:

• Heart disease – 4.5 years of additional life
• Cancer – 3.5 years
• ALL major diseases – 10-15 years

The average life expectancy in the U.S. for men is 76 and for women 81. Living an additional 10-15 years sounds pretty good but even though we would be without disease, we would still just be old longer.

Treating Aging

Enter the world of aging research and you find that the focus is not on curing disease but rather on fixing the process that causes it – AGING. Nearly all major diseases are related to aging, so if we address the underlying problem (aging), then we would not be dealing with most disease in the first place.

Few human trials have been conducted on aging treatments even though there are many animal studies that show promising treatments. Many of the mechanisms of aging are known and we must address the bulk of these in order to achieve real results. While we understand many of the processes to address, we are still several years away from identifying treatments.

Despite this there are some treatments available today with data in human trials that suggest beneficial results. Calories restriction is a major target as it has been shown to have a huge impact on increasing longevity; it is not however, an easy or pleasant process to subject oneself to. The good news is that scientists are focusing on cellular mechanisms that create results of calorie restriction without requiring the body to forego food. The main target of this research is activating an enzyme called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). They have identified a few treatments that turn on AMPK; calorie restriction, rapamycin, metformin, and even some supplements like resveratrol.

The benefits outlined above leave us with the question of whether metformin should be a treatment that even healthy individuals should consider. While the drug has been used safely in millions, it still carries some risk just as any other medication or supplement. The biggest risk is a life threatening condition referred to as lactic acidosis but it is rare, occurring in approximately 9 per 100,000 patient years and it is almost always in individuals with kidney, liver, and or respiratory compromise. Individuals should also limit alcohol intake while taking it.

Anti-aging in a Prescription

The subject of this article is metformin. Metformin is a prescription medication that was developed from an extract of the French lilac and has been used for several centuries to treat diabetes. What was not known was that metformin had an amazing ability to actually address several targets of aging.

A study published in 2014 in Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism, although not a clinical trial was pretty impressive. The study looked at 78,000 diabetics with 90,000 matched controls. The diabetic subjects that took metformin had a 15% increased survival, compared to the matched controls that did not have diabetes! A 2014 study from Singapore found that diabetics who took metformin had a 51% reduction in cognitive impairment. Other studies have shown that metformin reduces cancer mortalities as much as 57% and a 62% reduction in the incidence of pancreatic cancer in metformin vs. placebo.

Metformin has many anti-aging functions, some of these include:

• Lower insulin and fasting blood glucose
• Improved lipid metabolism
• Increased autophagy – the removal of debris and broken cellular components inside cells. Autophagy is a major target of anti-aging
• Beneficial alterations in gut microbiome

Potential benefits of non-diabetic individuals taking metformin include;

• AMPK activation – as mentioned earlier, AMPK activation is a major target for anti-aging researchers, it results in;
• Increased glucose uptake – GLUT-4 and GLUT-1 activation
• Increased insulin sensitivity
• Decreased gluconeogenesis – liver production of glucose
• Increased fat oxidation by cells
• Decreased cholesterol and triglycerides – this is accomplished via decreased intestinal uptake as well as decreased endogenous synthesis of fatty acids
• Increased mitochondrial health
• Increased nitric oxide through activation of eNOS and nNOS, this results in increased blood flow
• Increased autophagy
• Decreased mTOR – decreased inflammation and the ability to suppress growth signaling in cancer cells.

The first three items mentioned have a combined ability to maintain lower blood sugars throughout the day resulting in a decreased overall glycation rate in the body – a second major anti-aging target. Glycation is the process by which sugar molecules stick to proteins and cause a host of problems in the body. Glycation ability can be measured through a blood test for HbA1C and fructosamine.

• Shifting of gut microbiome. Researchers found that metformin favored the bacteroides species over the firmicutes. This is important because the dominance of firmicutes/bacteroides has been implicated in obesity, insulin resistance, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease as well as other disease states.
• Increased Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) sensitivity. This is a peptide involved in satiety and has reduced sensitivity in obese individuals. It is theorized that the gut bacteria mediate this mechanism and that the improved sensitivity is due to the shift toward the increase in bacteroides.

The benefits outlined above leave us with the question of whether metformin should be a treatment that even healthy individuals should consider. While the drug has been used safely in millions, it still carries some risk just as any other medication or supplement. The biggest risk is a life threatening condition referred to as lactic acidosis but it is rare, occurring in approximately 9 per 100,000 patient years and it is almost always in individuals with kidney, liver, and or respiratory compromise. Individuals should also limit alcohol intake while taking it.

My personal approach is to address this treatment in the following circumstances:

• Inability to lose weight despite good dietary compliance
• Elevated fasting insulin while despite eating a low carbohydrate diet
• Elevated HbA1C or fructosamine

As with any treatment, it should be fully discussed with your medical care professional with knowledge of the treatment.

From Apeiron @ http://ephysiologix.com/metformin-a-prescription-for-longevity-2/

For more information about longevity see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/longevity

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Are human head transplants coming soon?

Are human head transplants coming soon?

 

 

By Debra Goldschmidt

Dr. Sergio Canavero gives a TEDx presentation.

 

• Dr. Sergio Canavero says he is two years away from performing the first total human head transplant
• The first patient will be a 30-year-old Russian man with a rare, genetic muscle wasting disease
• One ethicist says Canavero should be helping paralyzed patients walk before performing body transplants

It sounds like the plot for a science fiction movie.

Someone has a horrific accident and winds up in the hospital, brain dead and on life support. Doctors approach the family about organ donation, but instead of saving as many as eight lives, the family is asked to donate the whole body to save just one individual. Perhaps a quadriplegic with a mind that outmatches their malfunctioning body. 

Dr. Sergio Canavero

As crazy as this sounds, to put an entire head on a new body, a human body, Italian physician Dr. Sergio Canavero says we are approaching HEAVEN (an acronym for head anastomosis venture; anastomosis is surgically connecting two parts). The pieces are coming together but there are still many hurdles to jump.

Canavero says he has part of the funding secured, although he says he can't yet disclose where the money is coming from as a condition of the funding. He's also taking the 2015 layman's approach with crowd funding and book sales.

He has identified Valery Spiridonov as the first patient. The 30-year-old Russian man suffers from a rare genetic disorder called Werdnig-Hoffman disease. Canavero says the man volunteered. The two men have talked via Skype but they have yet to meet in person and Canavero has not reviewed Spiridonov's medical records.

Canavero says he has a stack of emails and letters from people who want this procedure. Many of them are transsexuals who want a new body, he says. But he insists the first patients will be people who are suffering from a muscle wasting disease.

Another big obstacle is the need for a partner. Canavero can't just do this in his own Frankenstein lab. He needs a major academic medical center to host this endeavor and he has his eyes set on the United States. He hopes to get a buy-in this summer when he presents his plan to the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons, or AANOS, at its annual conference in June. He's counting on getting the green light he needs for the first human whole head transplant to take place in 2017.

Nick Rebel, executive director of AANOS, says the group is not endorsing Canavero, it is simply giving him a platform to hear what he has to say.

If Canavero doesn't get the support he needs in the United States, he'll look to China and his timeline will slide by a year.

Once these pieces are in place, Canavero says he'll put together a staff of 150 nurses and doctors. Many of them, like the patient, are already identified because they've asked to be part of this team.

Then they'll need to practice for what is anticipated to be a 36-hour operation. "I say two years is the time needed for the team to reach perfect synchronization," Canavero speculates.

But what about the science? Is such an idea even plausible? He says he has research that supports it.

Canavero points to Dr. Robert White, who transplanted the head of one monkey to the body of another at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1970. The monkey died after eight days, because the body rejected the new head. Before ithe monkey died, it could not move because the spinal cord of the head and body were not connected. The monkey also was unable to breathe on its own. The paper in which Canavero outlined his procedure references a different 1971 experiment White conducted with six monkey heads, none of which survived more than 24 hours. But Canavero says advances in science and medicine since then eliminate the problems White faced.

Dr. Hunt Batjer, chairman of neurological surgery at UT Southwestern and president-elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons, says White's research is not validation for a human head transplant. "[It's] a 45-year-old reference in a primate and there is no evidence that the spinal cord was anastomosed functionally," he says. Batjer further explains that it's a great leap to go from brain survival of the surgery to restoring body function, which White did not look at.

Canavero is confident in his writing and in conversation. He cites White's monkeys and even the success of German researchers who helped paralyzed rats walk, giving no pause to the fact that such research is more likely to go nowhere than to make it to human clinical trials.

He published his paper in the free, online, medical journal Surgical Neurology International in 2013. He walks readers through a scenario, outlining the key points that will make this work, including cooling the spinal cord before severing it. Doing so with an ultra-sharp blade will avoid the damage experienced by spinal cord injury patients, he says. He'll use a "magic ingredient" as a sealant to fuse the spinal cord back together and offers a few options for what that ingredient could be. The nerves, having been color-coded when separated, will be carefully aligned and this will all be done very quickly because time is key.

An impossibility, according to Batjer. He conceded that the airway, the spine, the major veins and arteries, can all be put back together, but the spinal cord is the problem. He says the result would be the inability to move or breathe.

"I would not wish this on anyone, I would not allow anyone to do it to me, there are a lot of things worse than death," Batjer says.

The science isn't there to support this, says Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He says it's nothing more than a big PR stunt, and calls Canavero "nuts."

Caplan says this has to be done in many animals before it's tried on humans. Caplan also points out that if Canavero can do this, he should first be helping paralyzed patients by fixing their spinal cords, before transplanting whole bodies.

As for the patients, Caplan says, "their bodies would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they'd go crazy."

In his paper, Canavero says identity issues could be a problem as the head gets used to its new body. He also says pain could be a problem. As far as immunosuppression, Canavero points to today's transplant successes as evidence this is not a problem.

Caplan isn't buying it. He's seen how difficult it is for his NYU colleagues who perform face transplants. The levels of anti-rejection medications required are so high they put patients at risk for cancer and kidney problems. He says it doesn't make sense that you'd poison a new body with immunosuppressant medications to make a head transplant work.

Another issue Caplan has seen with face transplant patients is they don't always get full function of their new organ.

"It's not like you can unscrew your head and put it on someone else," Caplan says.

Dr. Robert Ruff, the Veterans Affairs national director for neurology, calls it farfetched and farcical, not to mention unlikely to work. He says this is more like centuries away, not years. "It would be impossible to predict that far into the future," Ruff says.

Canavero insists, though, "We can already do this."

From CNN @ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/03/health/italian-neurosurgeon-says-human-head-transplant-will-happen-in-two-years/

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

- Russian Dog Head Experiment (9:59)

For more information about transplants see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/transplants

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