Four widely used medicines have emerged as possible life-extending drugs, after an analysis of UK health records found they were each linked with slightly lower chances of dying during a 12-year study.
The medicines are Viagra, for erectile dysfunction; atorvastatin, used to lower cholesterol levels; an anti-inflammatory and pain-killing drug called naproxen; and oestrogen, a component of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT).
The idea that existing prescription medicines could have life-extending effects on top of their known benefits for certain medical conditions has a long history. “We don’t want to cure or treat a single disease, we want to prevent many of them,” says at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
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Such effects can be hard to find, as any small benefits to lifespan may be outweighed by the negative impact from the condition for which the drug is prescribed, says Ocampo, who has also co-founded a biotech firm called Epiterna, aimed at developing anti-ageing compounds.
Ocampo’s team investigated the extent of these benefits by using data collected through UK Biobank, a large study following the health of about half a million people.
The largest difference in death rate was seen in women taking medicines containing oestrogen, mainly HRT products. These were linked with about a 25 per cent lower death rate over the study than in similar women who didn’t take the hormone.
As HRT improves bone strength, it could be keeping people alive longer by reducing their chance of breaking a hip, which can be very dangerous in older people due to the necessary surgery and long recovery period, says at the University of Brighton in the UK. There were also significant but somewhat lower effects seen in people taking Viagra (sildenafil), atorvastatin and naproxen.
When it comes to how these drugs may improve longevity, Viagra has recently been linked with a protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease. Statins reduce heart attacks and strokes, while naproxen dampens pain by lowering inflammation, which is suspected of playing a role in a wide range of conditions.
The findings can’t be taken as proof that these medicines make people live longer, as it wasn’t a randomised trial – the best kind of medical evidence – but just found correlations between taking each drug and a lower chance of death over the study period.
The correlations could have arisen because people who are healthier to begin with are more likely to use Viagra, for instance. The researchers tried to tweak their data to take account of such factors. However, “there can always be biases that are difficult to control for”, says at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
But some of the drugs had a larger benefit on lifespan when taken at higher doses, which seems to support the effect being real, says Ocampo. “I would not say that could be explained by a [healthier] lifestyle.”
One surprise was that the analysis didn’t find a lower risk of death linked with taking the diabetes medicine metformin, which has been suggested to extend lifespan in some previous studies, although not all.
MedRxiv
