Metformin & Muscles: Diabetes Drug Pulls New Tricks Out Of Its Hat

metformin muscle aging sparkler in hands

Photo: Milo Milk, Unsplash

A 50 Year-Old Drug Is Looking Like Anti-Aging Magic:

What do billionaires have in common with the rest of us?

No, not replacing all humans with robots to increase profit margins to infinity and beyond, silly!

They love money, and they do whatever they can to live as long as possible.

You can bet everything from The Shake-Weight, to blood transfusions, to Bryan Johnson’s exhaustive “Blueprint” and the suspended-animation of The 2045 Project has crossed their desks at one point or another.

When they’re not airlifting hypercars onto mega-yachts, they’re trying crazy health hacks.

Strangely enough, the basis for their new favorite looks like it might be even better than before…

The Short Answer:

Some rich nerds can be a great source of health hacks & ideas.
They may try a lot of things, but some will work.
The list of side-effects for many drugs are often bigger than their benefits.
University of Utah’s team is finding out the diabetes drug Metformin may have some great side-effects.
The first one researchers found is some patients were living longer on it.
This would seem due to a reduction in accelerated-aging caused by blood-sugar spikes.
The Utah team found subjects also experienced reduced muscle-scarring and atrophy.
This was surprisingly due to Metformin clearing out Zombie Cells that would have built-up in older subjects.
It’s also been alleged that the life-extension from Intermittent-Fasting is also due to Zombie Cell cleanup.
There is a chance that Metformin is even better at this.
Since this study suggests that the drug also helps subjects retain muscle, that could be a longevity-benefit, too.
Other studies have shown that muscle that is exercised acts like an anti-inflammatory.
Lowering inflammation through any exercise may also extend lifespan.
Metformin is a drug so is unlikely to be perfect, but its list of benefits is surely impressive.
You might want to also keep up the healthy diet, exercise, and intermittent fasting too, just-in-case!

Read on to find out the details…

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Researchers May Have Found A Drug That’s Better Than Its Side-Effects!:

We’ve all seen the prescription drug commercials on TV.

Many of these help people in important ways, but they’re not without downsides.

A common source of dark humor comes up when you hear the benefits first, and then the giant list side-effects later.

-Which in many cases, seem worse than the problem the medications are supposed to fix.

So it’s rare to find a drug other than Aspirin that has potentially great side-effects.

Stopping Damage Caused By Blood-Sugar Spikes Is Just The Beginning:

Until now.

Because a team at The University of Utah is finding out the current favorite drug of billionaires, Metformin, has some potentially-great side-effects.

The Silicon Valley crowd is currently using it for it’s strange anti-aging properties.

These were discovered by accident, when people on the drug just mysteriously started living 20 years longer than anyone suspected.

The likely path this works on seems to be reducing or eliminating blood sugar spikes.

And for a healthy non-diabetic person, this would mean reducing almost all cellular-aging from that currently-irreversible cross-linking (called “glycation”) to zero.

Small Study, Big Results. Especially When You Read Into Them:

So in a very small trial of 20 older subjects, Utah’s team found some other great side-effects of mysterious Metformin.

The subjects started out for the first two weeks by taking either a placebo or the drug.

They were then given a muscle biopsy, an MRI, and 5 days of bed rest.

Another biopsy came immediately after the bed rest.

This was followed by 7 days of light exercise rehab and then one more muscle biopsy & MRI.

The results were as follows:
1) The subjects who took Metformin had less muscle atrophy during the bed-rest period.

2) They also had less collagen-based scarring of their muscle tissues.

Stopping Muscle Problems Is Good, The “How” Is Great:

Now you may not be old or on bed rest, but the idea that a 50 year-old pill can stop muscle atrophy, even in vulterable populations is amazing.

The fact that it can stop a type of maladaptive healing in important tissues of the body is pretty amazing, too.

Because not only have you spared the structure, you’ve saved its function, too!

But Metformin still has a few more tricks up its sleeve, because the way it does it is also amazing.

Because the apparent wonder-drug seems to also work on something called Senescent Cells.

We would normally call these something much worse, “Zombie Cells“.

And as you might guess, they’re not normally viewed as helpful.

Metformin May Be The “Zombie Cell” Cleaner We’ve Been Looking For:

In our previous posts on them, we identified Zombie Cells as a biological mistake.

They get injured, start malfunctioning, and secrete all kinds of nasty inflammatories into the body.

But for some odd reason, the body just does not seem to clean them up as well as it should.

Interestingly enough, Dr. Micah Drummond’s says there is a certain level of Senescent Cells necessary for the body to heal from injury.

But as in all things to do with aging, the systems that would regulate them aren’t working as well as before.

::drum-roll, please!:: Metformin also fixes that, too!

That’s also the part of its action that prevents unnecessary muscle scarring at the biopsy sites.

But it might not be limited to just that.

It May Work A Lot Like Intermittent-Fasting, Maybe Better:

Because in-addition to helping older people with injury,

This part of its action might help anyone who needs to recover from muscle injury.

But there’s a stealth-benefit that’s hidden there.

One of the things we talked about in the Zombie Cell Post is how they basically sit around doing little else than causing problems.

In some of the stuff on Intermittent Fasting, it’s been found that the metabolism goes around cleaning up the zombie cells when it’s not busy with its part in digesting food.

There is a sizeable chance that this Zombie-Cell cleanup leads to all the life-extension benefits from IF.

So if I-F can extend your lifespan that way, there’s a good argument that Metformin probably does too!

Keeping More Functional Muscle Has Anti-Aging Benefits, Too:

One final note on muscle.

So now we have a completely new angle on how Meformin might help seniors recover from bed rest, in addition to the other amazing benefits.

But several previous studies are showing the ability to have more muscle mass on your frame as you age is a really good thing.

Just one of them showed that there are anti-inflammatory benefits to muscle itself.

The action of using your muscles, especially for exercise, actually reduces inflammation in the body.

And it does it through the exact same channels that the anti-inflammatory drugs target.

So now just imagine if the study’s anti-atrophy benefits extend further.

Imagine that you are able to retain more muscle mass longer in-part due to Metformin.

Less Chronic Inflammation, And Sometimes !SCIENCE! Gets It Right:

You may also end up with less total inflammation just due to the presence of that muscle.

And less inflammation would seem to indicate a longer & healthier life.

So in a sea of prescription meds that seem to be nothing more than side-effects,

It seems a rare set of events when one of them does its job well, but also has several side-benefits that turn out the be real force-multipliers for health and longevity.

Not that you should just sit around, take a bunch of meds and call your health situation good.

I hate to say it here on HT, which is like swearing in church, but there is probably also a limit to medication-based health-hacks.

So do your diet, exercise, and intermittent fasting work too. Don’t just pop pills and expect it to fix everything.

But if there’s one pill you are going to pop, Metformin is sounding more and more like a great choice.