Anti-Aging Enthusiasts Are Taking a Pill to Extend Their Lives. Will It Work? “The New York Times”
With this article the New York Times gives good examples about how Rapamycin works for human. They explained the main idea “Rapamycin for Longevity” with doctors and reserchers words and thoughts.Lets see who said what !
Mr. Berger( who interviewed for this article) said he hasn’t experienced any “‘Oh my God, I’m a different person’ kind of change” since taking it, though his dentist remarked that his gums looked healthier than they had in a long time, and he feels like he has more energy these days. But he admits “it’s really hard to tell: How much is this placebo?”
Longevity influencers Dr. Peter Attia and Bryan Johnson are believers, both saying they’ve taken rapamycin for years, and touting research to their millions of followers that shows the drug can extend the life spans of mice by over 20 percent.
Like Mr. Berger, some of the other users interviewed for this article said they believed rapamycin has provided mild benefits, such as helping them lose weight, alleviating their aches and pains or even causing them to regrow dark hair years after going gray.
Dr. Dean Kellogg Jr., a professor of medicine and geriatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio said “Other medications had been tested for their possible anti-aging properties as part of a National Institute on Aging research program, but “rapamycin was the first one that actually made a difference in longevity and health span in both male and female mice” . After that came studies in worms, flies and more mice — almost all showing that rapamycin extended life span.
“The demonstration that you could get the same effect across broad evolutionary distance — yeast, worms, fruit flies, mice — that really got people believing that this was something important and fundamental,” said Matthew Kaeberlein, who published the first study on rapamycin in yeast while he was a researcher at the University of Washington. (He is now the chief executive officer at Optispan, a longevity startup.)
“If you look at the hallmarks of aging, you can find evidence in the literature that rapamycin affects all of them,” Dr. Kaeberlein said.
The strongest piece of evidence, according to rapamycin enthusiasts, is not a sweeping finding about longer, healthier living. It’s a 2014 study in which adults aged 65 and older who took another mTOR inhibitor, called everolimus, had a more robust antibody response to the flu vaccine than those who got a placebo. The promise of those findings is limited, but not without value: Typically, the immune system declines with age. The greater response to the vaccine implies the drug countered that effect. “It really did suggest that in humans, these drugs, mTOR inhibitors, can improve something that becomes impaired with older adults,” said Adam Konopka, an assistant professor of geriatrics and gerontology at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research.
IS IT SAFE TO TRY RAPAMYCIN?
“The way people are using rapamycin off label today — which is mostly once a week, not super high doses — the risks are pretty low,” said Dr. Kaeberlein, who has taken rapamycin himself. But, he added, they’re not nothing.
