Acarbose

Extends lifespan in mice (ITP program). Long safety history for diabetes. Mechanism aligns with caloric restriction and metabolic health. UPDATE (August 23, 2026): PREPRINT — NOT PEER-REVIEWED. A bioRxiv preprint (posted 24 June 2026) profiled male UM-HET3 mice treated from 4 to 12 months with rapamycin, acarbose, 17-alpha-estradiol, canagliflozin or caloric restriction, using untargeted metabolomics across seven tissues. A feature-stabilized XGBoost pipeline identified treated animals as recipients of a lifespan-extending intervention well before survival curves separate, and a leave-one-intervention-out procedure showed that models trained on any four interventions correctly classified mice receiving a fifth, unseen intervention — implying a partly shared metabolic signature across mechanistically distinct treatments. The dietary antioxidant ergothioneine rose consistently in brain, plasma and muscle, alongside common lipid remodelling. If this survives peer review it is a candidate short-horizon readout for geroprotector screening, and it is a notable hint that this drug does not act in complete metabolic isolation. It is explicitly NOT evidence that ergothioneine mediates the effect or that supplementing it reproduces any benefit — the association is correlative and untested causally, the cohort is male-only, and no human data exist. UPDATE (September 27, 2026): PEER-REVIEWED PERSPECTIVE, MOUSE DATA ONLY. Austad, Kaeberlein and Miller (Frontiers in Science, Sept 17 2026) synthesized NIA Interventions Testing Program data across all 14 agents now shown to extend mouse lifespan -- acarbose among them -- and proposed 12 candidate "aging rate indicators" (ARIs; adipose UCP1, cap-independent translation, MEK/ERK and MEK/p38 signaling, mTORC1 activity, adipose macrophage M1/M2 ratio, FNDC5, GPLD1, hippocampal BDNF/doublecortin) meant to give a faster readout of a slow-aging state than waiting years for survival curves to separate. This builds on the same ITP dataset referenced in the August 2026 metabolomics preprint above. It is a research roadmap, not new lifespan or human data: most ARI evidence comes from one lab's mouse stock, sex-specific effects were common across the underlying ITP hits (9 of 14 agents benefited males only), and no ARI has been validated in humans, non-human primates, or dogs.

Evidence Scale