Dr. Jerry Reeves is a seasoned and effective leader in healthcare, and he just sent me this article. It is from a health news source online that points to a potential benefit of metformin. If an older individual has a serious illness or major surgery that puts them in a bedridden status for a while, they very quickly develop muscle weakness and loss of muscle mass. The muscles shrink. You may have seen that when you had a fracture and a cast. The muscles shrink if they are not used. In this small study, they discussed the changes in gene expression and molecular biology that led to muscle loss. They went on to show that metformin blocked those changes and preserved muscle size and strength.
The muscles become smaller and weaker if they are not used because of inflammation and scar tissue formation in muscle tissue. Cellular senescence seems to be the link between muscle inflammation, scar formation, and delayed recovery of function. Senescence has the same language root as senile. A senescent cell is usually an old cell. It can’t function normally anymore, and it also puts out chemical signals that cause inflammation, scar formation, and slower recovery. In lab animals, metformin delayed cellular senescence and prevented the inflammation and scar formation it causes in inactive muscles. Metformin prevented muscle loss.
This study was done in humans to see if metformin alone during bed rest could reduce muscle loss and cellular senescence during recovery and it did! Metformin treated individuals had less muscle wasting, reduced inflammation, and reduced cellular senescence. They did not lose as much muscle or strength. This is a small study, and it needs confirmation in more patients, but it is very promising. It also fits with known metformin effects that reduce inflammation, scar formation, and cellular senescence. So far, so good.
Now we get into the disinformation piece. The author of the news story went to a doctor for reaction. Here is what she said. I left her name out because it doesn’t matter and I don’t want to embarrass anyone.
"But you cannot start metformin in the hospital for many reasons -- it's just for sugar control," Dr. X said.
Metformin can affect kidney function, and it is not possible now to tell if using the drug to protect muscle would end up damaging the kidneys”, Dr. X added.
At this point it would be unwise to take metformin in hopes of protecting muscle function and slowing aging, she said.
"It does have side effects, some of them deadly," Dr. X said, adding that more research is needed before metformin can be considered an anti-aging drug.”
It seems that Dr. X missed the point. Patients with diabetes were excluded from the study. None of the participants were diabetic. Metformin was not for sugar control in this study and sugar control had nothing to do with the results. She goes on to say that metformin can affect kidney function and using it to protect the muscle could damage the kidney. That is how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. There is an issue with serious illness, metformin, and the kidney. People who are seriously ill can have reduced kidney function from the illness. Since we depend on the kidneys to remove metformin from the body, reduced kidney function can cause metformin to accumulate in the bloodstream and that can cause an acid buildup in very rare cases. I have never seen that happen and I am unaware of it ever happening in any of the patients who were treated where I worked. I led a team of 4 clinicians that focused on diabetes, hypertension, and related diseases. None of us ever saw a case of dangerous acid buildup. I have used as much metformin as anyone. While I can’t think of a serious complication that I have seen with metformin, I have seen many, many patients become weaker from bed rest. That frailty leads to falls, broken bones, dependence, and other problems.
There is every reason to think that metformin slows the progression of chronic kidney disease. Metformin does not damage the kidney. Metformin protects the kidney. As in muscle tissue, metformin reduces inflammation and scar formation in the kidney of lab animals that are not diabetic. When metformin for diabetes is combined with lisinopril or losartan, atorvastatin, an aspirin, and smoking cessation in patients with type 2 diabetes who already have kidney damage, only one sixth as many people progress to dialysis compared with patients in usual care—the treatment that most of us receive. Metformin protects all cells and organs.
We have a very good idea of the core reason why metformin is so powerful as a tool to slow aging and delay chronic illness. Jardiance is an expensive brand-name drug that was developed to treat type 2 diabetes. Because there is so much money on the table, Jardiance has been the topic of extensive medical research. That research has discovered a very exciting fact. Jardiance slows the progression of chronic kidney disease by one third whether the patient is diabetic or not. And we know precisely how it does it. Jardiance protects the kidney by switching on the master metabolic epigenetic switch AMPK which switches off the master metabolic epigenetic switch mTOR. In the fetus and child, AMPK acts as a survival switch when there is no food. AMPK stops growth and pulls calories from fat and muscle to keep the fetus alive until food is available again. AMPK continues to function as a survival switch in adults. Switching on AMPK activates other genes and chemical pathways that slow aging and delay chronic disease. Metformin does exactly the same thing. It directly switches off mTOR and switches on AMPK to protect every cell and organ in the body.
Jardiance has a similar benefit in congestive heart failure. The famous heart failure specialist Dr. Milton Packer explained the benefit this way. “However, regardless of how their actions are envisioned, it is now critical for physicians to reconceptualize SGLT2 inhibitors (like Jardiance) as organ-protective agents rather than glucose-lowering drugs. The antihyperglycemic (glucose-lowering) action of these drugs represents a tiny fraction of their broad portfolio of effects, which (when fully exercised) cause an adaptive reprogramming (by switching on AMPK) of stressed cells in a manner that promotes homeostasis and survival.” The benefits of Jardiance and metformin are much less related to lower glucose and more related to switching on AMPK to promote cellular health and survival. It is a much more precise approach.
This story helps you understand how important it is to be careful where you get your medical information. Just because it is published doesn’t make it true.
Berberine is available without the barrier of seeing a doctor and has similar effects to Metformin including ampk and mtor
Medical disinformation - here you are writing about non-deliberate misinformation - yes, often deadly. As we have seen, much is also deliberate, as happened with the scamdemic, both re the illness and the dangerous (presented as safe) injections.