India, June 6 -- A major new study from Chinese scientists is changing how we think about aging. For a long time, people believed aging was something we couldn't slow down. But this research suggests that aging might not be so permanent after all.
The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences looked at health data from 438 postmenopausal women in the U.S. Half of them were taking a diabetes drug called metformin, and the other half were on another diabetes medicine called sulfonylurea. The women on metformin had a 30 percent lower risk of dying before the age of 90.
To study how metformin affects aging, scientists also tested it on monkeys that are biologically similar to humans. Over a 40-month period, male monkeys were given metformin r...