Aging Matters
I’ve been in the field of aging research from the late 1990s, just the time when Aubrey de Grey was getting his start. Before others, Aubrey had the vision to realize that cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s would never be conquered without addressing their biggest risk factor: aging. From the beginning, I admired Aubrey’s successes … Read more
Fo-ti is a root herb from traditional Chinese medicine that has been used for centuries as an anti-aging tonic, and has shown promise in limited Western-style analyses. Interest has been held back by reports of liver toxicity, but there is some indication that the benefits can be separated from the toxic effects. In my readings, … Read more
This week, a headline-making study in the New England Journal of Medicine sought to cast doubts on long-established science that says daily aspirin can be a broadly-effective anti-aging tonic. I’m writing this response because I think that this new, small study has to be viewed in the context of many larger studies over many decades … Read more
Heat Shock Protein [My sources for much of this article are a 2018 review from University of Campinas, Brazil and a 2016 review on hormesis by Joan Smith Sonneborn, as well as the ever-inspiring and accessible summaries by Rhonda Patrick.] Most animals have the latent ability to live longer when stressed. It’s called hormesis, and it’s … Read more
What are the most effective things you can do to slow the aging process and extend your life expectancy? This is the question being asked by a clinical trial that I am organizing, and which seems to be rapidly taking shape. But before the study begins, we have to have candidates to evaluate. We should … Read more
The Mother of All Clinical Trials, which I announced in April, continues to progress at a charmed pace. This is a project to collect information from people who are already using a variety of measures to extend their life expectancy, and to use a methylation clock and some innovative statistics to tell us which combinations … Read more
Time and again, evolution has learned (after repeated blind alleys) to do what is best for the community in the long term and not always what is best for the individuals in the short term. But such gains are fragile, easily lost if a cheater can gain a short-term advantage and its progeny take over … Read more
Part II: Why We Should Trust the Methylation Clocks to Measure Aging Last week, I proposed that methylation age could be used to measure the benefits of putative anti-aging interventions. This procedure has the potential to slash the cost and the duration of testing. The reason is that we don’t have to wait for a … Read more
Part I: An Incipient Revolution in Epidemiology There are a great number of promising interventions that might have anti-aging benefits, singly and in combination. There is a testing bottleneck, which means that we don’t know what works. By way of contrast, there is a well-documented catalog of life extension interventions in lab worms, but for … Read more
I have been enthusiastic about telomerase therapies for anti-aging since 2003. But if I can’t change my mind as new data appears, what’s the point of being a scientist? I still believe that lengthening telomeres is a net benefit, but the potential for added years is modest, and there are probably risks and tradeoffs. The … Read more