Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that metformin a medicine popularly used to treat type 2 diabetes, can slow down aging . The discovery, made in primates and published on Thursday (12) in the journal Cell, offers insights into the cell aging process and opens space for future research to understand whether the same benefit is seen in humans.
Metformin is an oral antidiabetic medication known by its trade names, such as Glifage, Diaformin, Formet, Glicefor, among others. According to researchers, long-term therapy with the drug produced anti-aging benefits, increasing cognitive abilities, slowing periodontal bone loss, and promoting the rejuvenation of several tissues and organs, including the liver, heart, lungs, intestines, and muscle tissue.
Furthermore, according to the studythe protective effect of metformin against aging may be independent of its role in blood sugar control and metabolic regulation. According to the researchers, the drug acts directly on neurons, activating the antioxidant gene expression network and thus slowing down cell aging.
How was the study done?
The study used cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) as an animal model due to its physiological and functional similarities to humans. The researchers used a multidisciplinary approach, including physiological assessments, imaging studies, blood tests, and multi-tissue and multi-omic pathological analysis, to monitor male monkeys treated with metformin for 40 months.
The research also used machine learning models, a type of artificial intelligence, to build a multidimensional model to assess the aging of primate tissues and organs. The goal was to accurately assess the systemic effects of metformin on aging.
According to the study, the drug reduced indicators of biological age in primates, including DNA methylation age — an epigenetic mechanism that, when improperly established, can lead to a series of diseases — and transcriptome age (the set of RNAs expressed by a cell). In addition, the treatment reduced the age of plasma proteins and metabolites. In short, metformin reduced biological age in primates by six years — the equivalent of 18 human years.
The anti-aging effect was particularly significant in the frontal lobe area of ​​the brain and liver. Evaluations showed that metformin significantly delayed the aging process of various neural cells in the brain and hepatocytes in the liver, effectively reducing the biological age of these cells by 5 to 6 years — 15 to 18 years in humans.
In the researchers’ view, the new study establishes new paradigms and standards for evaluating the efficacy and safety of interventions in human aging, in addition to representing an important advance in the search for slowing down the aging process.
This content was originally published in Diabetes medicine may slow aging, study suggests on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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