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posted by takyon on Friday June 19 2015, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the immortality-committee dept.

Doctors and scientists want drug regulators and research funding agencies to consider medicines that delay ageing-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 ageing — making them worthy of government approval. On 24 June, researchers will meet with regulators from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the case for a clinical trial designed to show the validity of the approach.

Current treatments for diseases related to ageing "just exchange one disease for another", says physician Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. That is because people treated for one age-related disease often go on to die from another relatively soon thereafter. "What we want to show is that if we delay ageing, that's the best way to delay disease."

takyon: The "pill" in question is the drug metformin, currently used to treat type 2 diabetes under the brand name Glucophage. People with type 2 diabetes will not be enrolled in the anti-aging trial.


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  • (Score: 2) by tathra on Friday June 19 2015, @09:22PM

    by tathra (3367) on Friday June 19 2015, @09:22PM (#198436)

    even with that, you're still not going to live past 120, if you even get that far. lots of people have genetic timebombs waiting to go off too (alzheimer's, parkinson's, etc), diet and exercise won't do much to prevent or treat those (though i believe its been shown to help and delay onset). diet and exercise should be used on top of other [proven] anti-aging medicines, sure, but they are no means a cure-all, nor they guaranteed to work the same for everyone.

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