Bestler | Magic medicine that slows aging?

Several years ago, I found that I needed reading glasses. My eyesight was generally OK for distances, but everything turned into a blur close-up.

I began with 1.5 magnification, eventually moving up to 2.5.

About three years ago, reading a newspaper in the car while the bride drove, I suddenly realized I wasn’t using my glasses.

I checked and double-checked and it was true: Suddenly, I could read fine without the aid of glasses.

I didn’t realize eyesight could improve on its own. My only explanation – totally unscientific and with no basis in fact – was the medicine I had started taking for Type 2 diabetes.

It was metformin and my wife, a pharmacist, had assured me that it was one of the best medicines on the market for Type 2 diabetes.

I became a quick convert. Metformin, along with a near-total absence of candy, cookies, cake and such, has pretty much kept my diabetes in check.

The other day, reading a Time magazine report on aging, I found that metformin contained more magic than I thought.

Wrote reporter Mandy Oaklander:

“Some experts are beginning to think that aging can be slowed with certain drugs or compounds – if only they can figure out which ones.

“Now a promising new trial has set its sights on metformin, a drug that millions of Americans already consume.”

Turns out that medical researchers believe so strongly in the power of metformin that the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine is undertaking a new study called “Targeting Aging With Metformin.”

The $66 million study will be carried out at 14 centers across the United States. Researchers want to enroll 3,000 people ages 65 to 80 to see if taking metformin delays the development of illness and death.

There is reason for hope. A 2014 study found, Oaklander wrote, that “people with Type 2 diabetes who took metformin lived longer than healthy people without diabetes who weren’t taking it.”

The drug also has been linked to a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease, several types of cancer and glaucoma.

S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Chicago professor who is involved in the metformin trial, said the goal was not to make people live longer to but to make lives healthier by lowering the risk of heart disease, cancer, strokes, Alzheimers and osteoarthritis.

Pretty heady stuff, I’d say. And if major medical breakthroughs are found, it will make my improved eyesight pretty small potatoes.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 2:40 PM with the headline "Bestler | Magic medicine that slows aging?."