Hypertension drug rilmenidine can extend lifespan and delay ageing, study reveals

The study’s key findings include:

• The authors showed that treating Caenorhabditis elegans with rilmenidine at young and older ages increases lifespan.
• They also revealed that the stress-resilience, health span, and lifespan benefits of rilmenidine treatment in C. elegans are mediated by the I1-imidazoline receptor nish-1, implicating this receptor as a potential longevity target.
• Consistent with the shared caloric-restriction-mimicking gene signature, supplementing rilmenidine to calorically restricted C. elegans, genetic reduction of TORC1 function, or rapamycin treatment did not further increase lifespan. The rilmenidine-induced longevity required the transcription factors FOXO/DAF-16 and NRF1,2,3/SKN-1.
• Autophagy, but not AMPK signaling, was needed for rilmenidine-induced longevity. Moreover, transcriptional changes similar to caloric restriction were observed in liver and kidney tissues in mice treated with rilmenidine.

Professor João Pedro Magalhães, who led the research at the University of Liverpool and is now based at the University of Birmingham, said: “With a global ageing population, the benefits of delaying ageing, even if slightly, are immense. Repurposing drugs capable of extending lifespan and health span has a huge untapped potential in translational geroscience. For the first time, we have shown in animals that rilmenidine can increase lifespan. We are keen to explore if rilmenidine may have other clinical applications.”