Josh Mitteldorf

Part I : The Business Culture of Science Since 2000, there has been a 20-fold increase* in research funding for anti-aging medicine.  Wow! That’s a good thing. But let’s keep our eyes on the ball. There is danger that this welcome infusion of capital may be biasing research priorities toward those that are most likely … Read more

Every supplement has its downside.  Metformin and rapamycin are the best candidates among fully-developed products, and metformin can dissipate the benefits of exercise, while rapamycin can suppress immune response and raise insulin resistance.  NAD enhancers can affect epigenetic methylation and damage the liver.  I’ve written about the adverse effects of anti-oxidants, which are the most … Read more

Methylation update, Part II Imagine Horvath’s thought process last year, when the PhenoAge clock (described last week) was derived.  In order to evaluate anti-aging interventions in humans, the most useful measure would be a clock that estimates not how many years since your birth but how many years until your death.  The 2013 methylation clock … Read more

As I wrote last spring, we can efficiently test treatments for aging once we have an objective measure for the rate of aging.  Without it, we’re left with the standard epidemiological model: treating thousands of people and waiting for a few of them to die.  I have predicted that methylation-based aging clocks will turn a … Read more

I say “rumors” because there is no publication and results from just 6 rats, all of which were sacrificed for the sake of tissue biopsies.  Worse, we have no announcement of what the active agent(s) were that rejuvenated the rats, so discussion of mechanisms will have to wait. I’m writing this largely from personal and … Read more

At year end, I have a tradition of writing a column more speculative and personal than usual.  In this post, I consider critically the standard physicalist belief that our consciousness depends on a physical brain, and hence death is the end of all awareness.  I was 46 years old when I first considered the question, … Read more

Aging is an extension of the developmental program into a phase of self-destruction.  This much has become clear (if not yet uncontroversial) over the last decade. But this insight is of little use to us so long as developmental biology is so poorly understood.  I have worked from a perspective in which development and aging … Read more

This is a letter I wrote to a dear friend from the 1970s who has been diagnosed recently with colon cancer.  She had surgery last summer to remove the primary tumor, and is in the midst of a 12-week course of chemotherapy.  She has, in my opinion, a well-balanced view of the relative merits of … Read more

Senolytic drugs have been the most promising near-term anti-aging therapy since the ground-breaking paper by van Deursen of Mayo Clinic published in 2011.  The body accumulates senescent cells as we age, damaged cells that send out signal molecules that in turn modify our biochemistry in a toxic, pro-inflammatory direction.  Though the number of such cells … Read more

This is the most important column I’ve ever written.  The message is quite complex–dozens of new health parameters to test for and to optimize, all of them interacting in ways that will require new training for MDs.  The message is also as simple as it can be: There is a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. You … Read more