Episode 77: Anti-ageing, part 1

Whether it’s people giving themselves goat blood transfusions in an effort to maintain their youth, or yet another influencer telling you to buy XYZ miracle supplements, anti-ageing is big business.

In the first part of what will surely become a longer Studies Show series, Tom and Stuart look at the evidence for a few supposed “breakthrough” treatments that can slow down ageing: rapamycin, metformin, winding back the epigenetic clock, and calorie restriction.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. This week we talked about their new article on “through running”—the deceptively simple idea of not having trains stop at the edge of town and instead running them right through the centre. It seems obvious if you live in London, but it wasn’t always this way. Check out the article for a detailed, nerdy discussion about how we can make trains—and therefore citites—better.

Show notes

* New meta-analysis on rapamycin and ageing

* Website for Bryan “n = 1” Johnson and his related health claims

* Our World In Data on life expectancy and about the reasons why it increased

* Meta-analysis on methylation and the “biological clock” as a predictor of longevity

* The STAP stem cell debacle

* 2016 study using Yamanaka factors to slow down ageing in mice

* 2023 study of the same idea on wild-type mice, showing a 109% increase in life expectancy

* 2014 Scottish study on diabetes, metformin, and life expectancy

* Critical letter noting the study’s flaws

* Failed replication from Denmark in 2022

* The NIH’s Interventions Testing Program

* Older review of calorie restriction and ageing

Credits

We’re grateful to Andrew Steele for talking to us for this episode. The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.