Longevity Briefs: 14 Drugs That Might Extend Human Lifespan Are Already In Use

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel research in biology, medicine, or biotechnology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

The problem:

People all over the world might already be taking drugs that extend human lifespan, but we can’t prove it yet. Since humans live such long lives, it’s not really feasible to run a clinical trial in which we randomly give some people drugs and wait to see how long they live. There are a few ways around this problem – we can run shorter trials and use biomarkers of ageing to estimate whether treated people are ageing faster than the controls, or we can look at whether a drug targeting the ageing process can slow the progression of age related diseases. Both of these approaches have their problems. Another approach is to look at large datasets of people who are already taking drugs for some health condition or other, and see if any evidence of lifespan-extension can be extracted amidst the noise.

The discovery:

In this study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers looked at data from the UK Biobank, a large dataset containing data on drug prescription and health outcomes for over 500,000 participants recorded over the course of 40 years. They looked at the top 406 drugs that were prescribed to at least 500 people each, and compared the recipients’ lifespans to those of controls who were matched for factors known to affect lifespan. For example, a male smoker with cancer taking drug X would be compared to a male smoker with cancer not taking drug X.

Despite these adjustments, 169 drugs were associated with reduced lifespan, probably due to the disease they were being taken for (if your condition is worse, you’re more likely to be given a drug). However, the researchers also identified 14 drugs that were associated with a significant increase in lifespan. The most significant of these were:

• Atorvastatin
• Naproxen (an anti-inflammatory for arthritis)
• Otomize (an anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial for ear infections)
• Sildenafil (aka Viagra)
• Estraderm, Vagifem, estriol, and estradiol (all oestrogen-related drugs)
• Marvelon (a contraceptive)
• Lymecycline (an antibiotic used mainly for acne)
• Avaxim (a vaccine against hepatitis A)
• Revaxis (a vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and poliomyelitis)

The researchers also looked at classes of drugs as a whole, and found that statins and SGLT2 inhibitors in particular (a class of antidiabetic drugs that work by reducing the reuptake of glucose in the kidneys) were associated with increased lifespan. SGLT2 inhibitors were associated with an overall 36% reduction in risk of death.

The implications:

It’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the drugs mentioned in this study, since it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all confounding factors when comparing medicated and unmedicated people. Since people who take a drug usually have some kind of health problem, we might ordinarily expect them to be less healthy than the unmedicated controls, which would lead us to underestimate any lifespan benefits. However, when comparing people of similar health status, this doesn’t necessarily apply. A person with a chronic disease might stand to benefit from a drug, but may not take it because of the side effects, interactions with other drugs, or simply because the drug stops working and they need to move to other drugs. When it comes to less serious diseases, taking a drug may also reflect a person’s health-awareness and willingness to seek out medical treatment, which could be the real cause of their lifespan increase as opposed to the drug itself.

On the other hand, some of the findings of this study do line up nicely with previous research in animals. For example, estradiol and SGLT2 inhibitors are notable success stories from the ITP (interventions testing program), the gold-standard for testing if a compound extends lifespan in mice. Meanwhile the antidiabetic drug metformin (a hyped but controversial lifespan extension candidate) showed no benefit here, just as it failed to extend mouse lifespan in the ITP.