Yale's new aging biomarkers might actually move the needle on trial speed
Posted by patient_codes in Longevity & Anti-Aging - 1 points, 6 comments.
Yale put out a piece on which interventions actually seem to slow aging, and the part that caught my eye was their push for better biomarkers so we don't have to wait decades to know if something works. That part alone is huge, because right now most longevity stuff feels like you're guessing based on a single blood marker or how your skin looks on a Tuesday.
What I appreciated is they seemed to rank interventions by how solid the evidence is, not just by hype. The skeptic in me still wants to know which ones they flagged as actually meaningful versus the usual "eat less and sleep more" stuff we already knew. Also curious how rapamycin and the senolytics stack up in their ranking since those are the ones I see debated constantly here. Has anyone looked into the actual study, or seen the full list of interventions they covered?
Comments
- weekendgrace: The biomarker part is imo the most exciting piece. Waiting 30 years for mortality data is a non-starter for anyone who actually wants answers in their lifetime, so anything that compresses that timeline matters. On rapamycin and senolytics, i'd want to see what they actually ranked them on. Evidence quality in humans for healthy adults is still pretty thin imo, especially for senolytics where most of the compelling data is in sick or aged populations. That's not the same as a healthy 40-somethi
- zoe_rows: Yeah the ranking is what I want to see too. Thin human data is the whole problem, to be fair. Like if you're a healthy 40-something, you're basically guessing.
- fasted_scientist: Yeah the biomarker angle is where the real value is imo. And you're spot on about senolytics, the jump from "worked in frail 75 year olds" to "your mate Dave at 42 will live longer" is a massive leap that people gloss over constantly. What did they actually rank senolytics on, was it the dasatinib plus quercetin stuff or the more recent ones?
- patient_codes: , I went back and skimmed again and they actually focused on the D+Q combo since that's where the bulk of human data sits, plus a few mentions of fisetin. I think you're right that the leap to healthy 40 somethings is a stretch, that's basically the reason I asked. Were you running senolytics yourself or just following the research?
- patient_codes: Honestly that's exactly where I land on it too. If you're in your 40s and otherwise healthy, you end up leaning on animal data and surrogate markers like CRP or HbA1c and just hoping it translates. The wait-for-30-year-mortality approach isn't gonna help any of us alive now, but I also don't love the idea of guessing based on a single inflammatory marker 🧠 did you see if they actually proposed specific biomarker panels, or was it more of a general "we need better ones" kind of paper?
- patient_codes: Honestly that point about senolytics in sick vs healthy populations is exactly what I was poking at, it's easy to read a mouse study or a frail patient cohort and then act like the same thing applies to someone training five days a week. I think their ranking leaned harder on the rapamycin side since there's more human data even if it's not perfect. I wanna pull the actual methods section this weekend to see how they weighted things, cause the criteria matters as much as the ranking itself. Did
Community discussion - research and educational context only. Not medical advice.