Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan

Article: <a href="http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/C60-Fullerene.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/C60-Fullerene...</a><p>The part getting the attention has to do with longevity; for that part of the article, data comes from "[t]hree groups of 6 rats".<p>This was a single experiment in which n=6 rats received the C60 ('buckyball') composition, n=6 received just the oil, and n=6 received water (which can cause adverse effects in rats). Interestingly, a protective effect of oil gavage in some rat strains has apparently been observed before ( <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3591539" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3591539</a> ) but that's a bit of a distraction since the focus is on the C60.<p>All treatment stopped after a few months when the first control rat died. Given that the half life is 14h for peritoneal injection of this particular substance, there should have been nothing left of it after ~70h. How it continued to affect rat lifespan for several months afterward would require explanation.

I find myself a little sceptical of articles on a website called "extreme longevity", to be honest...<p>... also, skimming the linked paper, the largest sample I see is "sixty rats randomly divided into 10 groups of 6 rats". I'm not sure if that's really large enough to draw any solid conclusions, and I don't see any P-values for the lifespan data -- but I freely admit I'm neither any kind of biologist nor a stats expert, so I may be talking rubbish.

So what might be going on here?<p><a href="http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/a-puzzling-fullerene-study.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/a-puzzling-fuller...</a><p>The average life span of the Wistar rats used is 2-3 years (24 - 36 months). This was a small study size, but that's no so important in determining whether you have an actual means of life extension if you can show that any of your study group lived much longer than usual - but it is important when it comes to the degree of life extension. If the study group is small, as it is here, using only a handful of rats, then the size of the effect can be much more readily distorted by chance. This line in the paper jumped out at me: "Before C60 administration, the rats were fasted overnight but with access to water." If they failed to fast the control group, then we're looking at yet another study that failed to control for calorie restriction, and this is actually largely an intermittent fasting study - which has certainly been shown to extend life in rats.<p>This would explain how the olive oil administration also apparently extended life significantly...

Be careful when looking at lifespan studies. A huge increase in lifespan vs. control does not mean much if the control is badly treated and short-lived compared to max lifespan for that rat strain. Some rats normally live to 42 months. The C60 could be making up for bad conditions without extending max lifespan. If so, many compounds have been shown to do this. This exact scenario was the cause of the resveratrol craze.

Well, given the title I was expecting to be snorting dismissively, but this actually does seem interesting and I hope there's followup work. In particular, the fact that this was a group investigating C60 toxicity makes me less immediately suspicious of fudging, but then again if their funding were coming from someone making something with C60 in it they might have subconsciously treated the C60 rats better.<p>What I'd really like to see is a duplication with a larger sample size and some sort of blind setup with the people caring for the rats. And even then, there are good reasons to expect that this won't carry over to humans, given that humans already live so long for an animal of our body size.

Interesting -- there are plenty of articles on fullerene administration to rats over the past 10 years [1], but no mention of longevity effects.<p>[1]: <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&#38;q=fullerene+rats" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&#38;q=fullerene+rats</a>

Just discovered that google can convert long series of units.<p>Say you wanted to do this, at the obvious risk of some undiscovered toxicity, and say you weigh 200lbs.<p>At a cost of fullerene-c60 of $592 for 5 grams, at 1.7mg/kg, you're daily dose costs $18.26 <a href="http://www.google.com/?q=1.7mg%2Fkg+x+200lbs+x+592%2F5+dollars%2Fg&#38;oq=1.7mg%2Fkg+x+200lbs+x+592%2F5+dollars%2Fg" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/?q=1.7mg%2Fkg+x+200lbs+x+592%2F5+dolla...</a><p>Even worse, however, is the olive oil you have to eat each day, with the C60 disolved into it is 39 teaspoons! <a href="http://www.google.com/?q=1.7+mg/kg+/+0.8+mg/ml+x+200+lbs+to+tsp&#38;pf=p&#38;sclient=psy-ab&#38;oq=1.7+mg/kg+/+0.8+mg/ml+x+200+lbs+to+tsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/?q=1.7+mg/kg+/+0.8+mg/ml+x+200+lbs+to+...</a><p>Which is 4/5ths of a cup of oil per day.<p>EDIT: I guess they didn't actually get a daily dose.<p><pre><code> we treated the rats daily only during 7 days and weekly during the first two months, then every two weeks until one control rat died. </code></pre> Nor did they get dosed their entire lives, as earlier in the paper, we find that<p><pre><code> After five months of treatment (M15) one rat treated with water only exhibited some palpable tumours in the abdomen region. Due to the rapid development of tumours (about 4 cm of diameter) this rat died at M17. As rats are known to be sensitive to gavages, we decided to stop the treatment for all rats and to observe their behaviour and overall survival. </code></pre> So, it looks like they only treated for 7 months, for the most part, once every two weeks, and then no further treatment. The treated rats, after only 7 months of treatment, achieved the benefit.

Obviously not everything studied in Rat models scales well or is even effective at all in Humans, but the potential applications of this will surely raise a few eyebrows!<p>Interesting to note a daily diet of olive oil increased their average lifespan by 4 months alone! The Omega-3 fatty acids in it at a guess... but I wonder what the exact methods of action are for C60!

"Buckminsterfullerene" is named after Buckminster Fuller, who popularized geodesic domes. He had a word commissioned for him, "Dymaxion", and he used it for lots of his projects: Dymaxion Map <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map</a>, Dymaxion House <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house</a>, Dymaxion Car <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Car" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Car</a> .

This doubles median lifespan, not absolute lifespan, it's still impressive but would be much more so if it was doubling max lifespan.<p>edit: Checked the data, interestingly there's a fairly wide range of death in the non-buckyball population (more than 1 year) but the buckyball population all died within 3 months, oddly enough none of the groups overlap, the data looks almost perfect. Will be interesting to see what the results are with more subjects.<p>Full Study: <a href="http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/C60-Fullerene.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/C60-Fullerene...</a>

When I read headline I thought of those buckyball desk toys. I thought playing with them would help me live longer.

Choose a random compound X, feed it to rats and see what happens. Could somebody explain how does one choose X?

Have they done this experiment with any other configurations of carbon?

But how much of that effect is explained by the olive oil?

at the risk of sounding strange, is this or anything similar available to buy anywhere?