{"id":745,"date":"2018-08-01T23:33:16","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T23:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshmitteldorf.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=745"},"modified":"2018-08-01T23:33:16","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T23:33:16","slug":"the-most-effective-personal-anti-aging-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2018\/08\/01\/the-most-effective-personal-anti-aging-program\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Effective Personal Anti-aging Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are the most effective things you can do to slow the aging process and extend your life expectancy? \u00a0This is the question being asked by a clinical trial that I am organizing, and which seems to be rapidly taking shape. \u00a0But before the study begins, we have to have candidates to evaluate. We should begin with hypotheses about what we are evaluating. \u00a0My idea is to consult some experienced experts, and also to crowd-source this choice, and to ask for your help in selecting the supplements and life habits to be evaluated.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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Details of the trial were described in two blog posts last spring [<\/span>One<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Two<\/span><\/a>] and a more <\/span>technical manuscript<\/span><\/a> submitted in May. \u00a0Outcome will be evaluated based on a variant of <\/span>DNA PhenoAge<\/span><\/a>, taken from a blood test before, amid, and after the two-year trial. \u00a0We use methylation pattern differences rather than mortality or health outcomes because the latter take a long time to reveal themselves, and make anti-aging trials prohibitively expensive. \u00a0Using methylation clocks as an endpoint is a new idea, and we don\u2019t know if it will work, but if it does, it will be 100 times cheaper and 10 times faster than previous methods. We will have enough bandwidth to test a dozen different measures at once, which itself is a revolutionary step. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many measures are known that are thought to increase life expectancy by a year or a few years each. \u00a0Of course, we want to know which ones offer their greatest benefits. But even more important, we want to know how they interact, synergize, and interfere with one another. \u00a0If any one of these measures offered major benefits\u2014say 20 years of life\u2014its effects would be so apparent that we would probably know it already. Likewise, if these measures added up to 20 years of extra life, we would all know some people who are obviously younger than their chronological age. \u00a0Realistically, we must assume that most of the things we do are redundant. Combining <\/span>metformin<\/span><\/a> with <\/span>berberine<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>gynostemma<\/span><\/a> may offer little additional life expectancy compared to any one separately. \u00a0A panoply of different anti-inflammatory strategies may be little improvement over an aspirin a day.<\/span><\/p>\n

But we hope there are exceptions. \u00a0If two different measures act via completely different metabolic pathways, we have reason to hope that their effects should compound. \u00a0For example, perhaps life extension interventions based on <\/span>mitochondrial health<\/span><\/a> synergize\u00a0with interventions based on <\/span>rebooting the immune system<\/span><\/a>. \u00a0Then we might hope that the life extension available from these two measures together is greater than the sum of what we get from the two separately.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Study design<\/b><\/p>\n

We will not tell the people who sign up for this study what to eat, what pills to take, or how much to exercise. \u00a0We will ask people what they are doing, what they are eating, and what supplements they are taking in a detailed questionnaire. \u00a0We will select subjects so as to represent a broad array of different strategies and different combinations among these strategies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Broad, but not too broad. \u00a0We will have enough statistical power to estimate the interactions among every pair of measures out of 12 that we take as our independent variables. \u00a0These 12 should be chosen in advance, so the study has a clear focus. If there are more than 12, the number of interactions increases rapidly beyond what we can hope to distinguish (with multivariate statistics). \u00a0I\u2019ve decided to start with 15, and winnow the list as people sign up for the study and we see what <\/span><\/p>\n

Here are the criteria I propose:<\/span><\/p>\n