In the world today, people spend huge sums on clothing styles, hair styles, hair color, cosmetics, creams, and potions, all in an effort to look younger than the age noted on their birth certificate. It’s fine to want to look youthful, but an older person who uses such interventions to change their looks is not fooling Father Time. Are there any interventions that could instead roll back the infirmities of age, so that a person would have the functionality and health of a younger person? A lot of research is going into finding such an intervention. So far, the mythical Fountain of Youth alleged to have been sought in Florida by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, has not been found. There has been some progress in this effort however.

In 2020, a paper appeared in Cell Metabolism titled “Benefits of Metformin in Attenuating the Hallmarks of Aging.” This seems like it might relate to Ponce’s unsuccessful quest, and prompts two questions:

• What is metformin?
• What are the hallmarks of aging?

Metformin is a drug that has been in widespread use for over sixty years. It is long out of patent and thus inexpensive. Anyone with the appropriate resources can synthesize it without having to pay royalties to anybody. It is a commonly prescribed drug for Type 2 diabetes, which is widespread in the developed world. With such a large addressable market, metformin is widely available.

The nine hallmarks of aging are characteristics that change over the course of a person’s lifetime. They are:

• Genomic instability
• Epigenetic alterations
• Loss of proteostasis
• Deregulated nutrient sensing
• Mitochondrial dysfunction
• Cellular senescence
• Stem cell exhaustion
• Altered intercellular communication
• Telomere attrition

As an organism ages, these hallmarks become increasingly more pronounced. As the title of the Cell Metabolism paper attests, metformin attenuates these hallmarks of aging. It appears that Ponce had been misled into thinking that a Floridian fountain held the secret to long life, when he should have been searching for metformin. Alas, he was born too soon. Metformin would not be first synthesized for another couple of hundred years.

I don’t want to dive too deep into the weeds of technical terminology regarding life processes. To do so would make this post way too long. Suffice it to say that metformin has a positive effect on all nine of the hallmarks of aging.

Great! Let’s drop everything and run down to the drug store to buy a month’s supply of metformin.

Wait. We can’t quite do that. The drug store will have metformin in stock. That is not the problem. The problem is that metformin is a prescription drug. That means that you must have a prescription from a medical doctor to buy it. If you have type 2 diabetes, you should have no problem getting your doctor to prescribe it for you. She will prescribe it for your diabetes, and you will get the anti-aging benefits as a bonus.

Hopefully the time is not too far off when metformin will be recognized as a legitimate treatment for the hallmarks of aging and people will be able to get it without having to be a diabetic first.

BIO:

Allen G. Taylor is a 40-year veteran of the computer industry and the author of over 40 books, including Develop Microsoft HoloLens Apps Now, Get Fit with Apple Watch, Cruise for Free, SQL For Dummies, 9th Edition, Crystal Reports 2008 For Dummies, Database Development For Dummies, Access Power Programming with VBA, and SQL All-In-One For Dummies, Third Edition. He lectures internationally on astronomy, databases, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He also teaches database development and Crystal Reports through a leading online education provider. For the latest news on Allen’s activities, check out his blog at wwwallengtaylor.com or contact him at allen.taylor@ieee.org.