Low-cost diabetes drug may delay effect of ageing on brain and body: Chinese scientists

Test animal tissue showed slowed biological ageing and brains showed improved cognitive function after metformin doses, team wrote in Cell

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A Chinese study published in Cell journal is the first to thoroughly investigate the role of metformin in mitigating the ageing process in primates. A further study in collaboration with Merck is expected to study metformin and ageing in older men. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 7:00pm, 17 Sep 2024Updated: 1:08am, 18 Sep 2024

Chinese scientists say a highly accessible and low-cost drug used to treat and prevent diabetes could hold great promise in countering the effects of ageing.

In a 40-month study of adult male cynomolgus – or crab-eating – macaques, the researchers found that long-term administration of metformin could systematically delay organ ageing in primates, in particular delaying the effects of ageing on the brain by about six years, the equivalent of 18 years in humans.

The findings could “pave the way for advancing pharmaceutical strategies against human ageing”, according to the team from the Institute of Zoology and the Beijing Institute of Genomics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

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The researchers – led by Liu Guanghui and Qu Jing from the zoology institute and Zhang Weiqi from the genomics institute – reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Cell on September 12.

They divided the 13 to 16-year-old monkeys – the equivalent of 40 to 50-year-old humans – into two groups.

The control group comprised 16 older monkeys and 18 young or middle-aged animals, while 12 older males were given 20mg/kg of metformin per day, the standard dose used to control diabetes in humans.

After the study, which lasted 1,200 days – the equivalent of about 13 years in humans – the CAS team analysed samples from 79 types of tissue and organs in 11 systems throughout the monkeys’ bodies.