Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Snake oil

Sirtris has developed a new wonder drug, it's an all-in-one caloric restriction mimetic and no-effort-required weight loss program! It's like resveratrol but 1000 times better!!!

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Wait, is there any actual evidence of resveratrol extending lifespan in metazoans? Even the yeast and C. elegans evidence is unconvincing; to my knowledge, no one outside his lab has ever been able to duplicate Sinclair's results. Since the lifespan assay is so prone to experimenter-introduced bias, Linda Partridge went through and did a more thorough analysis of the putative lifespan extension, and didn't find anything. (Being a veteran kool-aid drinker, I actually ran an experiment myself using wild type C. elegans and some other worms treated with dsRNA to give them an unusual germ-cell 'cancerous' phenotype...didn't help with aging, or the cancer, for that matter.)

I'd be pretty leery about using large amounts of resveratrol (which is effectively what this new compound is) as a supplement. People have picked up all kinds of low-affinity (~micromolar) targets for it, with a variety of mechanisms, which isn't surprising, given its structure. In particular, it seems to hit the adrenergic receptors and affect Wnt signaling, which is ok in small amounts but you wouldn't want to deluge your system with this stuff.

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