Our study, performed in C. elegans and human primary fibroblasts shows that there is an age-related decrease in metformin tolerance, which in later life leads to toxicity of all metformin doses tested. This shows possible safety risks of late life administration of metformin to individuals without diabetes,"
I have been taking metformin for anti-aging purposes for about 6 months now. I decided to take it mainly because the risks are small, and I wanted to counter the natural bias on these sorts of things, which always leans towards "doing nothing".
By taking metformin, it means I have a personal stake in the developoment of anti-aging medicines and have a reason to evaluate any newer options that appear (since there may be a reason to switch metformin to another treatment) I feel like taking metformin makes me less biased when it comes to evaluating treatments in the field, even if I think the efficacy of metformin is still an open question.
In terms of side effects, I have noted mild gastric upset (I actually wonder if this is part of its mechanism of action, making you less hungry in this way) but little impact on exercise (I take it even on days that I exercise, and I have a fairly heavy exercise routine)
My mother died from a combination of metformin and colchicine. She had renal insufficiency, the FDA had warned not to prescribe metformin to people with renal insufficiency, and it made her kidneys worse. She had been taking daily low dose colchicine for gout, but the worsened kidney function caused a poisonous level of colchicine to build up. She vomited so much, she lost a too much electrolytes and ended up in the hospital delirious. The hospital thought it was a stroke and tested for that, eventually ruling it out, but the time wasted on thinking it was a stroke, obscured a growing instability in her kidneys, liver, thanks to the insufficiency, colchicine, and bad electrolyte levels.
When they infused electrolytes, it swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, and she suffered wild swings in blood levels of potassium, etc. Eventually her kidneys and liver failed at the same time, multiple organ failure, usually for someone in their 60s is not survival. I watched her die slowly over a few days as everything came crashing down.
Afterwards, I tried to get the hospital to conduct an autopsy to show overdose of colchicine levels, but the pathology department somehow "wasn't set up for that" and they said I'd have to send her body to some specialist lab. I didn't want to cause anymore pain with the family, so I opted to just bury her. But I definitely see this as medical malpractice.
And it's a clear warning to not ignore FDA contraindication warnings, even if your doctor apparently doesn't read up on the latest research or alerts.
If you're healthy enough to exercise, that's probably more effective. Apparently (I haven't tested myself, and I don't know how thorough the literature is) metformin lowers your lactic threshold, which reduces the total amount of work you can do in that state.
Do cardio, sleep enough, avoid refined sugar and fats that are solid at room temperature. More than that... godspeed
Avoiding "solid fats" aka saturated fats is bad advice. The science behind saturated fats being harmful has been debunked and even some government agencies have rescinded the recommendation to avoid them.
On the contrary, it's the liquid fats that are more often harmful, especially linoleic acid (aka omega-6).
Isn't it amazing how they can make such confident recommendations about these dietary issues without having the data (real data, not some bs study) to back it up? They end up reversing themselves over and over, utterly destroying societal trust in the field of dietary medicine.
I wouldn't personally consider rolled oats, rolled barley, or rolled rye to be refined sugars, nor are they quite in the white rice, potato, corn, flour starch category, despite flattening a "grass seed/fruit" being a type of "processing."
Furthermore, oversimplifying food advice tends to leave out conversation of how food breaks down. The main ways are time, grinding, heat, fermentation. Fermentation gets a bit of an asterisk at the end of hard rules lists. They may say no dairy but then exempt fermented dairy. Lactofermentation of oats will be less starchy than uncooked oats.
Well, there's a bit more variety there than cooking oil - I think the "healthy fat" category usually includes nuts, avocados, olive oil, salmon, etc. I don't think chicken (including the skin) is supposed to be bad either. [1]
From my understanding of the available evidence, these fats are supposed to be more healthy than other animal fats / butter (saturated fat). [2] Whether saturated fats are bad or not depends on what you compare them to - they seem less healthy than say, olive oil, but might win out over refined carbs. And the most clearly bad one is trans fat which has the strongest evidence against it.
These articles always bring up a lot of comments that use the phrase "good for you" or "healthy", but in my experience most of the time a person saying "___ is good for you", they pretty much never quantify how or why.
Can you explain, in what capacity oils aren't "good for you" ?
So we're deriving that an entire class of foods aren't "good for you", because of a specific outcome in a study conducted on rats?
edit
Also, the effect produced on the rats was weight gain. Is all weight gain bad? Oils aren't "good for you" because "weight gain"? So, if a person's goal was to gain weight, would oils be "good for them"? And if yes, isn't this just way too broad a statement ("oils aren't good for you") to have any value?
This whole comment section is totally delusional regarding the reliability of medical statistics and preliminary data in life science. It's funny (and sad) to see people easily disparaging "state-of-the-art treatments" be so prone to experiment on themselves with moonshot claims.
No matter what, the underlying reality, is that there are certain chemical you can take in the right amount per person to give you the best health possible. We might not be there for a while but studies help us in that direction.
Yes, I agree. But not all studies. There is a substantial proportion of studies that are just statistical noise, and a smaller but still substantial part that are outright fraud.
However, individual experiments are not studies in the academic sense. Especially if they are not formally reported so that the experience is not lost in time.
But an individual has no choice in his/her actions except the "moonshot". We are individuals, not statistical aggregations. Every choice we make is, in a way, a "moonshot".
In medicine, if you opt in for something that falls into the domain of the experimental or research, then you should know that you are doing this for yourself, but for others who will benefit from the knowledge that it worked or failed. If it works, it'll just be a happy accident and means absolutely nothing in isolation regarding population-level guidelines.
Which is why officially, people have a choice in participating to research studies but aren't allowed free access to whatever drug they want to take. This opinion is also supported by current medical ethics and practitioners have a duty to make their patients clearly understand that.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, american patients have a lot of trouble in understanding that last point.
Certainly. And in that case, you should proceed only if really desired. And realize that doing this is not meant to help you, but to help others who will learn from the experience.
I agree but this proves difficult to pull off practically, at least in the US, because you need to find a provider that will support your choice. Without that you lose access to essentially all standard medicine.
For decades, we were told that the food pyramid was the ideal healthy diet and that dietary fat was the enemy. It was all bullshit.
Eggs are healthy, eggs are unhealthy, eggs are really unhealthy, eggs are healthy, eggs are really healthy.
I had trained medical professionals tell me twenty years ago that I was going to ruin my kidneys with my low-carb dieting. Twenty years later, I'm still keeping the weight off and medical science has started to catch up to what I knew just by experimenting on myself with moonshot claims.
The biggest problem with medical science (just look at how COVID issues were butchered by politics and celebrity), is that they refuse to just say, "We don't really know." Because all too often, they have no clue. But they are trained to come up with answers and sound confident about it.
There are many things I don't know. However, here's one thing I know to be true: individual experiments do not make for population-level generalizations. Additionally, dieting by reducing or even excluding a single well-known food category when there are many more left appears as less radical than taking a pill that will rebalance your whole metabolism, don't you think?
Regarding the "we really don't know" part: one can observe that people here are basing their own shamanic medicine on what they read in scientific papers, suddenly pretending that those papers can be trusted while they'll disparage the theories of clinical practitioners as being old-fashioned and manipulative. Well, it happens that many of those theories are based upon lots and lots of research and certainly more so that the "fad of the day" is. And yes, those theories are often refuted after years of clinical application, which does not bode well for experiments based on "few papers shamanic medicine".
1. People want to take metformin. They will cite various sources they extract from Pubmed, but the truth is that they got the impression that metformin was good for them while reading pop-sci articles and Facebook threads.
2. They then proceed to ask their doc for metformin, since it's a prescription drug. Unless the doc wants to commit career-seppuku or the patient has a reason for taking metformin according to current guidelines based on years of clinical use and research, the doc will refuse even when presented said Pubmed evidence.
Conclusion: people who want to take metformin will look into alternate sources, because they built a preconceived belief and nothing a sensible professional says will change their mind. People then proceed with metformin and if a change in indication occurs in the future that agrees with their belief, they will feel vindicated while in fact they are just lucky fools.
Yes, there's evidence for that. However the jury is still out on whether metformin is a net benefit for people with healthy insulin sensitivity. It appears there are negative effects:
Derek Lowe talks about the negative effects of metformin on healthy people:
Metformin likely blunts the impact of high intensity exercise. But for the 65% of people living sedentary or low activity lives, it’s a straight win. Even for those who are consistent with physical fitness, the downsides can likely be avoided by waiting a few hours after the morning exercise session to dose.
Folks that take metformin for anti-aging usually take it on exercise off-days. There was concern about lactic acidosis, but it's beginning to become clear that it mostly arises in patients with comorbidities.
>Metformin forms the base plank of novel metabolic cancer regimens too.
For which you'll likely have to lie to or find an alternative oncologist who's willing to tolerate adjuvant therapies that aren't 'standard of care'.
There are organizations that are developing protocols that include metformin along with statins, anthelmintics and even some antibiotics that are showing promise across a variety of research and even some clinical trials to help fight cancer through a number of mechanisms. Independently they are not likely sufficient to beat cancer but may slow its roll through the body of the patient.
“alternative” practitioners have been keeping humans healthy for several millennia prior to the existence of the AMA and their so-called “standard of care”.
The magic of placebo. Chiropractic school dropout, with the bonus of having a ex girlfriend who was a Herbal Doctor. A Naturopath? I forget.
What really sealed the deal was this one professor. Attractive lady whom spoke like she was addressing the United Nations. I still remember the time she told me to show the class my Coccyx. I was relieve I had good underware on.
Back to the most rediculious statement from the red lipstick mouth of a PhD. (I comment on her appearance because she was cute. So--please don't take it any other way. I know there are people waiting to pounce.)
She stated,
"We have over 15 upper cervical techniques, and they All work equally well." Studies, and Placebo Effect are conviently never talked about at that school."
That said, I feel most modern medicine is not much better.
Placebo rules in every healing art.
The kid in front of me, at Chiro school, was the spitting image of health. I was actually jealous. He was getting weekly adjustments. He was getting something called a Rotary Adjustment.
He was biking with his wife, and father in-law on a sunny Saturday. He stopped peddling, and fell over. Died of a massive stroke, at 25.
While I'm here. Sharon Stone was a big Chiro fanatic. Out of the blue she developed bilateral aneurisms, or tears?, in her neck. A world renowned vascular surgeon happened to be giving a talk at UCSF. The hospital asked him to perform the delicate surgery. It was obviously successful.
Those so called alternative practitioners lack scientific rigor, I am afraid of, or more likely just do not know what they are doing. Exceptions exists of course.
Many have more scientific rigor than AMA acolytes. Not all, of course. And then again the AMA and its ilk have plenty of breakdowns of scientific rigor. Let’s see now, vioxx, valsartan, omeprazole, to name a few. And let’s not forget the completely unscientific circus around hydroxychloroquine and those effectively denied treatment on that pack of lies (research surgisphere to get to the truth there)
Years and years of widespread clinical practice would be my standard, but I'll make do with multiple large-scale randomized studies AND precise guidelines if absolutely necessary. As for evidence seeking, clinical research happens to be part of my job so I don't really need assistance, thanks.
Research is not "years and years of clinical practice". Do you agree that "years and years of clinical practice" is not a good criteria to use for prescription, or are you just saying you don't use anything until other people have been using it for years and years. (and in this case, hasn't it been used for years and years?)
I don't use anything not covered by guidelines if I can avoid it. And in the event I can't avoid it, I'll always go for the more usual practice, i.e. the one backed by years and years of experience. If you want to participate in clinical trials, that's another matter entirely and has nothing to do with usual care or individuals taking whatever on their own.
It's the standard of one particular professional with 15y of clinical practice and research who's seen every kind of manipulation and incompetence in medicine. But yeah, it may be silly. We'll see about that in the coming decades I guess.
I'm not planning to take metformin but it was discovered a century ago and has been in use for half that time. A quick look shows me that it's the 4th most prescribed medication in the US. I find it hard to understand how this would not satisfy "years and years of widespread clinical practice", at least with regards to understanding negative implications.
But as you said, you can do your own research, so I'll leave things where they stand. You just sound more like someone who's annoyed by pop-science more than someone who actually has strong opinions about the article or Metformin.
I am well aware of the downsides of metformin since someone ends up in my ER (and sometimes dies) because of it most weeks. So you'll excuse me if an off-label and very new potential indication is not an immediate go for me. When we want to open a new indication for a particular drug, evaluation of the risk-benefit ratio for this particular indication has to be performed. There are many factors at play and results are completely unpredictable.
As for the rest no, I'm all for pop-science because it's what stimulates the interest of the masses. The problem in my eyes is more that academic medical studies available to the wider public are akin to a very sharp saw, and people will get cut if they don't know what they're doing.
Yeah I'd recommend you open up with information like that in the future, just right off the bat. It's a lot more interesting and at least somewhat useful.
Metabolic syndrome is on the same spectrum of chronic illnesses as type 2 diabetes. It's not surprising that even non-diabetics can benefit from t2d drug metformin considering that only 11% Americans are fully metabolically healthy meaning they meet none of the criteria for metabolic syndrome.
But if you are one of these metabolically healthy people, you probably wont benefit from metformin.
The only way to get a reliable answer at this point appears to be a large, randomized trial - the TAME trial (https://www.afar.org/tame-trial) was supposed to have started in 2020. Although the official website doesn't say so, I found various articles in the press from late 2019 which said they had raised all the $75 million they needed for it (for example, see https://www.longevity.technology/worlds-first-anti-aging-tri...). After that, it has been radio silence from them - no website updates, no press releases. Although their website says they have clinical sites set up, I haven't been able to find the clinical trials.gov entry for it. I even sent an email to the PI Nil Birzalai (at Montefiore in NYC) a few weeks ago to find out more, but didn't get a response. Does anyone know whether that trial even got off the ground?
Yes and no. If that's literally allmit does and it doesn't do it to an extreme amount i'd have no issues with it, but it also points to it possibly causing other effects that we need to be looking for and studying so we don;t get caught unaware of it destroying ecosystems that we depend on for our lives too. You have to remeber that we don't exist in isolation drom the environment and if it causes that in fish, it might be causing other problems in us, or in plants and animals that we depend on directly or indirectly.
We’re all living in the same (complex!) ecosystem. It’s possible that the fish you’re relegating to be less important than you are somehow benefiting you in some indirect way
Our study, performed in C. elegans and human primary fibroblasts shows that there is an age-related decrease in metformin tolerance, which in later life leads to toxicity of all metformin doses tested. This shows possible safety risks of late life administration of metformin to individuals without diabetes,"
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-age-decisive-positive...