Science ScienceAlert This Common Blood Pressure Drug Boosts Lifespan And Slows Aging in Animals

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The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been found to slow aging in worms – an effect that, if it translates to humans, could one day help us live longer and stay healthier in old age.

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.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. 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.

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

Watch the video below for a summary of the research:

“For the first time, we have been able to show in animals that rilmenidine can increase lifespan,” said molecular biogerontologist João Pedro Magalhães, from the University of Birmingham in the UK.

“We are now keen to explore if rilmenidine may have other clinical applications.”

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.

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

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

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.

“We found that the lifespan-extending effects of rilmenidine were abolished when nish-1 was deleted,” the researchers explain in their paper.

“Critically, rescuing the nish-1 receptor reinstated the increase in lifespan upon treatment with rilmenidine.”

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

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.

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“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.

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).

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

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

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.

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 – rather, they were following professional medical advice. What’s more, there wasn’t a placebo group.

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.

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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.

“With a global aging population, the benefits of delaying aging, even if slightly, are immense,” said Magalhães.

“Repurposing drugs capable of extending lifespan and healthspan has a huge untapped potential in translational geroscience.”

The research was published in Aging Cell.

An earlier version of this article was published in January 2023.

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