clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk Antidepressant may hold key to long life An antidepressant drug has been found to boost lifespan by around 30 per cent by tricking the brain to thinking it is starving. A wide range of studies on creatures as diverse as fruit flies and mice have shown that restricting calories, while still obtaining all key nutrients, can extend life span by up to half. Now it seems that one kind of antidepressant drug may be able to achieve a similar effect by triggering the same circuits in the brain as starvation. Although the study was done in the nematode worms Caenorhabditis elegans it will give a boost to research to find new ways for people to hold back the ravages of time. The study in the journal Nature reports how Prof Linda Buck and her colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, Seattle, screened 88,000 chemicals to see whether they had lifespan-enhancing effects on C. elegans.