In September 2019 I wrote a post called “The Fountain of Youth Discovered? Maybe a Trickle.” I ended it with a promise: “Today we have a trickle. Tomorrow we will have a stream.”

Almost seven years later, it’s time to check my work.

The trickle

The study that excited me was small. Nine men, ages 51 to 65, took growth hormone plus two other drugs, DHEA and metformin, for a year. The goal was to regrow the thymus, a gland behind the breastbone that trains your immune cells.

The thymus is biggest in childhood. After puberty it starts to shrink and fill with fat. By your seventies there is little working tissue left, and your immune system weakens with it.

In seven of the men, MRI scans showed new thymus tissue where fat had been. Their epigenetic clocks also ran backward, by about two and a half years on average. Steve Horvath, who measured the clocks, said he had expected a slowing, not a reversal.

Here’s what I’d say differently today. Back then I wrote that the benefits seemed to outweigh the risks. I got ahead of the evidence. Nine men is a tiny study. There was no placebo group to compare against. Growth hormone carries real risks. It was a first hint, not a treatment.

The stream

The next evidence came from bigger and better trials.

In one, 220 healthy adults spent two years either eating normally or cutting calories by 25 percent. On a pace-of-aging measure, the calorie cutters aged 2 to 3 percent slower. I covered that one in an earlier post.

Then, this March, came a result I’d been waiting for. Researchers measured five epigenetic clocks in 958 older adults, average age about 70, in a large two-year trial. Some took a daily multivitamin, some took cocoa extract and some took a placebo.

The multivitamin slowed two of the five clocks. On one, people aged about 1.4 months less per year than the placebo group. On the other, about 2.6 months less. People who had been aging fastest before the trial saw the biggest effect. Cocoa extract did nothing.

That’s modest, and the researchers said so. A couple of months a year is not a fountain of youth. But it came from nearly a thousand people, a placebo group and a cheap daily pill. That’s the kind of evidence the 2019 study couldn’t give us.

What I take from it

First, the clock moves. Biological age is not fixed, and real trials with real controls can slow it.

Second, it moves slowly. Anyone promising to take ten years off your biology in ten weeks is selling something.

Third, the biggest levers are still the familiar ones. For me that’s strength training, cardio, eating clean, the sauna and a daily journal. I know it’s good for me. I’m glad the science keeps catching up.

There’s a bigger reason these trials matter. Regulators don’t treat aging itself as a disease a drug can target, so few drugs get tested against it. A test that measures aging in two years, rather than waiting decades for people to get sick, is how that changes.

The river

In 2019 I wrote: “Today we have a trickle. Tomorrow we will have a stream. And soon we will have a river.”

I’d say we have a stream.

This is not medical advice.

Sources

Jon Sabes is a named inventor on U.S. Patent No. 11,817,214 and managing member of LongevityFP Technologies, LLC, which holds an exclusive license to FOXO Technologies’ epigenetics technology.