• Question: do you believe the age halting drug being tested will work? if it does, how long will it halt ageing for (google didn't know... ) ?

    Asked by alpacasmurf to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      This is a very tricky question. Science has certainly made many, many advances in medicine and in helping people with age related diseases like Alzheimer’s. But halting aging entirely is much harder! At the moment, know one really knows whether we’ll ever be able to halt the ageing process or how long it would last if we could.

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Francesca knows more about this than I do, but I agree anyway – stopping ageing is going to be really hard. Right now the best we can hope for is continuing to age, but living longer by staying as healthy as possible.

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I think I know the research you’re talking about and it’s very interesting but in very early stages of testing really. The drugs will combat the ageing process and potentially extend our life spans and prevent age-related diseases. There’s actually a list of 117 drugs that have been tested to activate an anti-ageing molecule found in humans. Weirdly enough, there are small amounts of a molecule in red wine that activates this anti-ageing molecule in humans but the drugs being tested are a lot stronger than that. Basically though, these drugs are likely to have similar effects to eating healthily and exercising regularly, which also activates the same anti-ageing molecule in us. So I suggest just living well rather than waiting to see if these drugs will work!

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      That’s a good question! I think it might work, possibly having a small effect, and maybe future versions of the drug will have a bigger effect. But we probably don’t fully understand how ageing happens at the moment, so we might cure one part of ageing (like skin becoming wrinkly, or bones getting weaker) but we might not cure another part (like becoming more forgetful as you get older). That might be very strange, so we have to be careful when we start doing things like this!

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