It is useless in old age to prolong life. Youth should be prolonged, wrote Ivo Andrić. His words seem to be the leitmotif of a growing number of scientists in the West who want to prolong human youth, treating old age "as a disease that needs to be treated." These scientists believe that it is possible to delay the aging process so that people are in good health even at the age of 120.
“If we could slow down aging in humans, even just a little, that would be monumental. People could be old and feel young. The ability to stop aging could be the most important medical intervention in the new era" - said Dr. Jay Oshansky from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the documentary "Breakthrough: The Age of Aging", recently shown on National Geographic.
Life expectancy in the West has increased by 160 years in the last 40 years, and is now growing at a rate of three months per year, or six hours every day. In the past three decades alone, the average life expectancy in the West has increased by seven years. And that trend continues, so scientists predict that more than half of the babies born in the developed world after the year 2000 will live to be 100 years old. The goal, as claimed by Dave Bos, the head of the Methuselah Foundation, which promotes longevity research, is to achieve that life expectancy increases by one year each year. And now there are already numerous strategies for that.
One of the ways to prolong life, some scientists claim, is a calorie restriction diet. 60 years ago, scientists observed during an experiment on rats that those who ate less lived 50 percent longer. Inspired by experiments on laboratory animals, the late California scientist Dr. Roy Walford launched the calorie restriction diet as a life extension strategy. He believed that by maintaining body mass 10 to 25 percent lower than normal, a person can extend his life span up to 120 years. Although the theory has gained many adherents, it has never been confirmed in clinical studies. However, one of the studies pointed to harmful side effects of caloric restriction such as decreased immunity in older monkeys. Based on this, it was concluded that a balanced diet is more useful than a caloric restriction diet for prolonging the life of primates.
In the last ten years, scientists have discovered several potential "elixirs of youth", among which metformin, rapamycin and resveratrol stand out. At the same time, metformin and rapamycin are well-known drugs that have been used in medicine for a long time. Metformin has been prescribed for almost 60 years as a drug against diabetes, while rapamycin has long been used as a cytostatic and as a drug that prevents organ rejection during transplantation. Research on mice in recent years has shown that both metformin and rapamycin can extend lifespan by about 40 percent.
Bonus video:
