Aspirin, metformin share common mechanism Whats Hot A report by scientists from McMaster University, the University of Dundee and the University of Melbourne, published online on April 19, 2012 in the journal Science suggests a common mechanism for salicylate—aspirins active compound—and the drug metformin in decreasing the risk of several diseases. Salicylate, a plant product, has been in medicinal use since ancient times, Simon A. Hawley and colleagues write in their introduction to the article. More recently, it has been replaced by synthetic derivatives such as aspirin and salsalate, both rapidly broken down to salicylate in vivo. The authors explain that salsalate or aspirin administered in high doses result in the activation by salicylate of adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a regulator of cell growth and metabolism. AMPK is known to be activated by exercise as well as the antidiabetic drug metformin. Were finding this old dog of aspirin already knows new tricks, commented co-principle investigator Dr Greg Steinberg, who is an associate professor of medicine in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University and the Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Obesity. In the current paper we show that, in contrast to exercise or metformin which increase AMPK activity by altering the cells energy balance, the effects of salicylate are totally reliant on a single Ser108 amino acid of the beta 1 subunit. We show that salicylate increases fat burning and reduces liver fat in obese mice and that this does not occur in genetically modified mice lacking the beta1 subunit of AMPK, he noted. The fact that both metformin and aspirin activate AMPK suggests that their recently publicized benefits in reducing the risk of cancer could be due to a shared mechanism. However, only further studies can confirm the validity of this interesting hypothesis.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 02:35:28 +0000
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