{"id":473185,"date":"2025-12-26T16:54:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/473185\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T16:54:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:54:23","slug":"this-common-blood-pressure-drug-boosts-lifespan-and-slows-aging-in-animals-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/473185\/","title":{"rendered":"This Common Blood Pressure Drug Boosts Lifespan And Slows Aging in Animals : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hypertension drug rilmenidine<\/a> has been found to slow aging in worms \u2013 an effect that, if it translates to humans, could one day help us live longer and stay healthier in old age.<\/p>\n

Rilmenidine appears to mimic the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level, and reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health<\/a>, is a topic of ongoing debate<\/a>. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.<\/p>\n

Related: Dick Van Dyke Credits His Longevity to One Habit, And It’s Backed by Science<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In a study published in 2023, young and old Caenorhabditis elegans<\/a> worms treated with the drug \u2013 which is normally used to treat high blood pressure<\/a> \u2013 lived longer and presented higher measures in a variety of health markers in the same way as restricting calories, as the scientists had hoped.<\/p>\n

Watch the video below for a summary of the research:<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

“For the first time, we have been able to show in animals that rilmenidine can increase lifespan,” said molecular biogerontologist Jo\u00e3o Pedro Magalh\u00e3es<\/a>, from the University of Birmingham in the UK.<\/p>\n

“We are now keen to explore if rilmenidine may have other clinical applications.”<\/p>\n

The C. elegans worm is a favorite for studies, because many of its genes have similarities to counterparts in our genome. Yet in spite of these similarities, it is still a rather distant relation to humans.<\/p>\n

Further tests showed that gene activity associated with caloric restriction could be seen in the kidney and liver tissues of mice treated with rilmenidine.<\/p>\n

In other words, some of the changes that caloric restriction gives in animals<\/a> and thought to confer certain health benefits also appear with a hypertension drug that many people already take.<\/p>\n

\"VariousSome human cell types and their nuclei on the left, compared to cells from C. elegans on the right. (J.J.Froehlich\/CC BY-SA 4.0\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Another discovery was that a biological signaling receptor called nish-1 was crucial in the effectiveness of rilmenidine. This particular chemical structure could be targeted in future attempts to improve lifespan and slow down aging<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“We found that the lifespan-extending effects of rilmenidine were abolished when nish-1 was deleted,” the researchers explain in their paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Critically, rescuing the nish-1 receptor reinstated the increase in lifespan upon treatment with rilmenidine.”<\/p>\n

Low-calorie diets are hard to follow and come with a variety of side effects, such as hair thinning, dizziness, and brittle bones.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s early days still, but the thinking is that this hypertension drug could confer the same benefits as a low-calorie diet while being easier on the body.<\/p>\n

Related: New Blood Pressure Guidelines Mean You May Now Have Hypertension<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

“This research presents a novel case for rilmenidine to be considered a potential calorie restriction mimetic through its prolongevity and health preserving effects,” the authors write<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What makes rilmenidine a promising candidate as an anti-aging drug is that it can be taken orally, it’s already widely prescribed, and its side effects are rare and relatively mild (they include palpitations, insomnia, and drowsiness in a few cases).<\/p>\n

\"ARilmenidine is normally used to treat high blood pressure. (Prostock-studio\/Canva<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Recently, observational research<\/a> hinted that the drug metformin<\/a>, which is already used to manage type 2 diabetes<\/a>, may also give older women a better chance of living to the grand old age of 90.<\/p>\n

Scientists in the US and Germany analyzed data from a long-term US study of postmenopausal women. Records on 438 people were picked out \u2013 half of whom took metformin to treat diabetes<\/a>, and half who took a different diabetes drug<\/a>, called sulfonylurea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those in the metformin group were calculated to have a 30 percent lower risk of dying before the age of 90 than those in the sulfonylurea group.<\/p>\n

The study can’t demonstrate cause and effect like a randomized controlled trial (RCT), because the participants weren’t randomly assigned to one treatment or the other \u2013 rather, they were following professional medical advice. What’s more, there wasn’t a placebo group<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A key strength was the average follow-up period of 14 to 15 years, extending far beyond the length a standard RCT would be able to. That’s important to understand how any intervention impacts lifespan.<\/p>\n

Related: One Critical Factor Predicts Longevity Better Than Diet or Exercise, Study Says<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ll need a lot more research to figure out if rilmenidine might also work as an anti-aging drug for humans, but the early signs in worms and mice are promising. Scientists now know more about what rilmenidine can do, and how it operates.<\/p>\n

“With a global aging population, the benefits of delaying aging, even if slightly, are immense,” said Magalh\u00e3es<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Repurposing drugs capable of extending lifespan and healthspan has a huge untapped potential in translational geroscience.”<\/p>\n

The research was published in Aging Cell<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this article was published in January 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been found to slow aging in worms \u2013 an effect that, if it…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":473186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[210,352,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-473185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-msft-content","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115786919616633636","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}