[suryong]

What we really need is robust treatments that either slow down the ageing process or reverse it to some extent. There is some promising research relating to both slowing and reversing. The current approach where we treat age related disease as individual things will never really work out in the long term

One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given, won't make you live to 150 but will probably reduce risk of disease.

I am considering starting rapamycin myself as my mom was diagnosed with ALS few months ago (doesn't seem strictly genetic as her mom and dad lived relatively long and didn't get that disease), so I might have some risk genes..

World where people live to 90-100 and where increasing amount have dementia or other age related disease won't be a nice place

[eesmith]

> One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given

Note every animal. Quoting https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1:

] Although the overwhelming majority of studies on the effect of rapamycin on longevity in mice have shown a significant increase in lifespan, there are five studies that have reported either no effect or reduced lifespan when treated with rapamycin.

When you write "every animal it is given" .. do you mean only flies and mice?

I've been having a hard time finding results for any other animals.

There's a decade of research with marmosets (here's a 2012 mention about it in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/492S18a ), but none of the papers I find report lifespan, only secondary measures (eg, "Long-term treatment with the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin has minor effect on clinical laboratory markers in middle-aged marmosets" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.22927 ).

Since marmosets live for about 15 to 16 years, surely there should be something concrete by now if it has the same effect on middle-aged marmosets when the research started.

I found there's research for dogs, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8507265/ says it's also ongoing. I haven't found any published results on lifespan only, again, on secondary effects (eg, quoting the paper, "An initial randomized, double-blind veterinary clinical trial confirmed the safety of this treatment and provided indications of potential efficacy (benefits for cardiac function) in dogs".)

What other animals have shown improved lifespan with rapamycin?

If it's only flies and (most) mice, is that really enough to call it "promising" in humans?

[suryong]

Of course we cannot be 100 % sure it will work for humans, but the results on mice are promising and they are replicated by different labs which is very rare for anti-aging compounds. Rapamycin consistently shows effect. The effect on humans probably won't be anywhere near the 25% increase that is shown on mice, we will maybe get some extra years + better health span but the cumulative effect on society will probably be more than any current intervention. If we look at how ageing appears on different mammals, it is actually remarkably similar in terms of the decline, the speed is just different so I would say it is indeed quite promising if the mice results are replicated majority of times.

There was study on a drug what is now called Everolimus (mTOR inhibitor) and it showed that it increases the influenza vaccine effectiveness on elderly people https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25540326/

The dog aging study is ongoing and they are conducting double-blind placebo controlled trial for rapamycin on dogs. https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/tech-entrepreneurs-pledge-25-mi...

Some smaller scale study on rapamycin for dogs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411365/

I just don't think there is any compound currently that is more promising than rapamycin, so that's why I mentioned it here.

The most promising future treatment seems to do with cellular reprogramming as it increasingly looks like epigenetic alterations are responsible for a large part of aging, the epigenetic drift theory of aging. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-019-0204-5

Good video about epigenetic drift theory by Vera Gorbunova from University of Rochester. https://youtu.be/FhfXP_MX0U4?t=639

The current way of doing medicine for the elderly will never work simply because of ageing, it is like trying to bail water from a sinking ship without fixing the hole. Will work for a short while until it doesn't. I am also very skeptical of getting a working treatment for diseases like Alzheimer's disease without intervening in ageing.

Already when I was a teenager I realized that treating ageing is the holy grail of medicine and it seems recently this field is gaining more attention, but realistically it will be decades in minimum until we get some more radical treatments, might be even longer. At least the billionaires have realized that there is not much point being a billionaire if your body is breaking apart.

All we have now is lifestyle choices, possibly some medicine like rapamycin, and just hoping we don't get unlucky. Worrying trend is also people taking HGH for anti-aging but in the lab it seems to have complete opposite effect, it actually seems more like ageing accelerator.