Research Synthesis: Acarbose Effects — full paper

Researka accepted publication: 1af9023a-8377-457d-8366-ffde4ec68a32 Source submission: 71ba0741-eb91-47b9-9e54-645ed6178d80 Evidence-honesty note: 38/47 retained sources are indirect, review-level, adjacent, or mechanistic and are used only to bound interpretation. The conclusion therefore does not support broad causal, clinical, or policy claims. This paper synthesizes evidence on acarbose effects across 47 included source papers and 2780 high-confidence extracted claims. The evidence profile contains 9 direct clinical sources, 16 adjacent clinical sources, and 4 mechanistic or model-system sources, with 317 cross-study disagreements across the evidence base. Positive study-level signals are summarized in the cardiometabolic, contextual adjacent evidence and immune outcome classes, null signals in the contextual adjacent evidence, cardiometabolic and deficiency prevalence outcome classes, and negative signals in the contextual adjacent evidence and cardiometabolic outcome classes. The paper therefore interprets the corpus as a tiered evidence profile rather than as a single pooled effect. The conclusion is that acarbose effects should be treated as a bounded geroscience hypothesis: the retained clinical and mechanistic evidence profile defines the scope for targeted testing, while mixed and null findings limit any unqualified anti-aging claim.