Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen the blockbuster success of GLP-1 drugs for regulating appetite, metabolism and blood sugar. The medications are also in clinical trials for a slew of alternative use cases: long COVID symptoms, irritable bowel syndrome, addiction treatment and more. Now, biohackers are going rogue (as they tend to do), taking subtherapeutic levels of semaglutides (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatides (brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound) in a quest to slow the biological aging clock. Jamie Ducharme has the skinny for Science News.
🪓 Hackers gonna hack
The shift toward microdosing is rooted in the discovery that GLP-1 receptors are found in the brain and heart, not just in the digestive tract. However, the medical community isn’t ready to hand over the prescription pad to everyone just yet. Experts have expressed significant skepticism in a letter to a diabetes journal, noting that we lack long-term data on how these drugs affect people who are already at a healthy weight. Since every drug has side effects, the risk-benefit calculus is different when benefits aren’t yet proven. And no matter the substance, once users start self-medicating, all bets are off.
♾️ The $80 billion tailpipe
Selling products to address insecurities around aging is, well, age-old.
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