Fight Aging!

Sadly, we live in an age in which the media likes to generate conflict, and in which the role of personal responsibility in most aspects of life (and certainly in the matter of medicine) is denigrated. It is a culture that rejects risks, costs, and benefits that cannot be quantified easily, and demands a centralized, legalistic approach as to who is and is not permitted to take those risks. On the other side of the fence, those taking the risk of trying new therapies that are not fully understood are in all too many cases doing it without sufficient forethought and planning. Too many people take wishful thinking and popularist rhetoric as fact. They don't want to understand the details, and look for quick, certain answers where quick, certain answers doesn't exist. This is not a great environment in which to try to promote a responsible attitude to medical self-experimentation and risk, such that self-experimentation is encouraged as a way to make progress towards a better world in which people are healthier than would otherwise be the case. But what is the alternative? Age to death on the normal schedule and not rock the boat? Sometimes the boat needs to be rocked.

Bryan Johnson often tinkers with his daily regimen of drugs, peptides in the form of both supplements and injections and other medical interventions in pursuit of a longer life. He's part of a growing crowd of tech entrepreneurs who are seeking extra years by hacking their own bodies - and sharing their exploits widely through social media and other channels. Wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of early-stage science to the public, who turn preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks that combine supplements, other compounds, protocols and therapies, long before FDA approval.

But there is a danger to this growing phenomenon: researchers who study ageing and longevity warn that these biohacks have not been clinically tested, meaning that it's unclear whether they work or might harm people. There is no medical intervention that is proven to extend human life by targeting ageing itself, says Andrew Steele: "There probably are things on our radars that might work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans." Nir Barzilai is torn about the impacts that the biohackers have. Take Johnson's tinkering with various supplements and drugs, which is usually based on some kind of evidence: "If you're asking, 'Is he taking something that doesn't make sense?' I would say, no, these things are based on biology but not on clinical evidence."

Neither Steele nor Barzilai are cynics. Both say that some of the protocols being tested and touted by Silicon Valley elites could have a meaningful impact on lifespan and healthspan - the time during which people are not affected by chronic disease and disabilities related to ageing. But the evidence isn't there yet. Matt Kaeberlein calls it "a signal-to-noise problem". In the limited available data about these interventions, he says, "there's signal there, but there's a whole lot of noise". That makes it hard for the public to separate the two.

Link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valleys-longevity-biohackers-are-engaged-in-a-dangerous-experiment/