It seems antidepressants don’t just help humans. Roundworms given a particular antidepressant lived longer – possibly because they were fooled into behaving as though they’d run short of food. A low-calorie lifestyle is known to boost the lifespan of worms and some mammals, so it might be possible to use the drug as an aid to longevity in humans.
Michael Petrascheck and his colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, exposed the worm Caenorhabditis elegans to 88,000 chemicals to see which, if any, caused them to live longer. Petrascheck noticed that one of the successful compounds…
