I’ve not checked in with Bryan Johnson for a while (because he blocked me), but now I do—surprise, surprise, he’s monetising Blueprint!

The website that used to show his protocol is now a store…let’s take a look at some of the products. blueprint.bryanjohnson.com
First up, ‘Essential’ Capsules.

What do these contain? The web page claims ‘clinical trial equivalent doses’ of various vitamins and things. The doses aren’t actually specified, but what do the clinical trials say?

Speaking of rapamycin…this article is a great summary

@KristerKauppi’s quote highlights a challenge we’ll all need to grapple with when it comes to medicines for aging—we’ll never have that perfect 100-year trial, so at what level of risk/benefit trade-off do you pop the pills?

https://twitter.com/mkaeberlein/status/1653065021612752896

I’m 37 and don’t take rapamycin…1/1000 odds of death per year are low enough that I don’t mind waiting for a bit for more evidence to come in, plus evidence in mice suggests you can start rapa pretty late (~60 in human years) get most of the benefit so I’m not in a hurry.

Great piece on the ageing of the ovaries from @emilylmullin!

‘The fact that the ovaries age so much faster than other body tissues also makes them a valuable way to test anti-aging drugs…which could have implications for aging in both women and men.’ wired.com/story/aging-me… Hormones and ageing generally is a fascinating area. Where ovarian hormones estrogen and progesterone seem to keep women healthy, testosterone may bring about early death in us men—the most compelling evidence being the impressive lifespan of eunuchs! science.org/content/articl…

Nice thread summarising a recent paper on how we acquire mutations throughout life, how they might influence the ageing process, and what we can do about it

https://twitter.com/MatttBuckley/status/1652804539958054913

I (perhaps obviously!) think the ‘what we can do about it’ part is the most exciting. Either learn from other animals that have a much lower rate of DNA mutations: learn from other species, learn from our own egg and sperm cells, or eliminate mutated cells

https://twitter.com/MatttBuckley/status/1652804554172555265

LOL, so after I posted a few tweets suggesting Bryan Johnson (net worth $400m) should stump up the cash to actually do clinical trials before offering his ‘Blueprint’ as a product…the big man blocked me.

Seems he managed to turn back his Twitter-age to ‘man-child’… Longevity ‘science’ has a chequered history of quacks and charlatans offering ‘elixirs’ made from mercury, or sewing monkey testicles to clients promising extended virility.

Shedding this reputation is why it’s vital that modern longevity actual-science is squeaky-clean.

High blood pressure has no symptoms and is incredibly common—even a few percent of 16–24 year-olds have it, according to this story!

Get you blood pressure checked!

Here’s why (short thread…) bbc.com/news/health-65… Every time your heart beats at too high a pressure, it puts strain on your circulation—from big blood vessels, where it can increase the risk of cholesterol getting stuck in the walls and starting the process of ‘atherosclerosis’ which can cause heart attacks and stroke…

I had a lot of fun doing a second @guardianclasses Masterclass on the science of ageing last week!

We run polls during the class, and the results can be intriguing. Here’s one where I asked what the ideal life expectancy would be from a societal perspective… Those are combined results from two classes—and, even though it’s a sample of people who’d turn up to a masterclass on ageing biology, there’s still a perception that the ideal life expectancy would be perhaps a little bit higher than now…but not too much?

Seen on the Tube: this ad showing that Randox, whose brand identity basically exists because of covid testing contracts, are now moving into shonky consumer wellness tracking. Wow. £295!! Essentially to have the opportunity to be worried and have some tests to bother your NHS GP with.

Breaking news: flying still ridiculously bad for the environment.

This is a good, simple summary of our plane predicament, but very frustrating that it could’ve been written almost word for word twenty years ago or more… bbc.com/news/science-e… The only annoyance in the piece is this graph, which dramatically underplays the emissions difference by displaying emissions per kilometre. When was the last time you drove to Spain, or caught the bus to Australia?!

That Cochrane Review that found no evidence that masks work was…a bit fishy?

Great piece by @KelseyTuoc which goes through the methodology, but also reveals that its author is…covid-eccentric? eg believes it was circulating for years pre-pandemic! vox.com/future-perfect… Incidentally, this is one place where one should place intuition (usually very low on the evidence pyramid) alongside meta-analysis (usually its pinnacle).

It would be absolutely shocking if well-fitted N95s weren’t protective in a healthcare setting—which this study found!

A bombastic @WSJ headline says covid most likely leaked from a lab. Just a few paragraphs in, it turns out that the new assessment is made with ‘low confidence’.

All of which means my video on this remains surprisingly relevant! (short thread) This is a great thread from @angie_rasmussen laying out the evidence:

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1629938451628843010

People who had viral infections like flu are more likely to later be diagnosed with dementia.

Lots of caveats here (see next tweet), but I think future generations will be…surprised by our lackadaisical approach to common infections. nature.com/articles/d4158… Caveats: we don’t know whether the infections cause dementia or changes that lead to dementia make infection more likely; because this is based on medical records, only infections severe enough to merit a visit to the doctor get counted; data mainly people of European ancestry.

It’s nature we should thank!

Aren’t they gorgeous? :)

https://twitter.com/Stephen_Curry/status/1616798298052132867

This is a fun thread about the sabre-toothed sausages:

https://twitter.com/mckinleaf/status/1521625152743694351

HAVING A KID MAY AGE YOU BY 11 YEARS

?!?

The press coverage of this paper was absolutely terrible. As, to be fair, was this ridiculous section of the abstract.

Wouldn’t we have noticed if being a mum knocked a decade off your life expectancy?!?! academic.oup.com/humrep/article… The study looked at the length of the ‘protective caps’ on the end of our DNA, known as telomeres. These get shorter with age as our cells divide, and can also be shortened by other things like stress and smoking. People with shorter telomeres tend to die sooner. Uh-oh.

The world’s oldest person, Jeanne Calment, died on 4th August 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days.

She is a MASSIVE STATISTICAL OUTLIER.

So when will her record be broken?

A thread: I decided to do a simple statistical analysis on the world’s 50 oldest people. I did 10,000 random simulations.

The results:
• The most likely outcome—in 91% of simulations—is that NONE OF THESE PEOPLE BREAK HER RECORD.

The world’s oldest woman, French nun Lucile Randon, who survived both world wars, the 1919 flu pandemic, and even saw off a covid infection aged 117!!, died yesterday aged 118 years and 340 days.

RIP Sister Randon.

A thread… theguardian.com/society/2023/j… I don’t claim the gift of prophecy, but I called it a year ago: the record of world’s oldest person remains firmly with Jeanne Calment (122 years 164 days, died in 1997).

https://twitter.com/statto/status/1519589372374532096

How do you propose we increase lifespan without also increasing quality of life and reducing cognitive impairment, @elonmusk?

It’s diseases and frailty that both reduce quality of life and kill us! And, in the lab, treatments that make animals live longer make them healthier too

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1615191698451369984

Calorie restriction—everything from yeast and worms to mice live longer and healthier.

Drugs like rapamycin given to old mice reduce disease, frailty and cognitive decline as well as extending life.

And humans who make it to 100+ live independently until they’re 100 on average!

More interesting evidence that lithium might extend lifespans?

‘Lithium can extend lifespan in animal models. Lithium in drinking water is correlated with human longevity. We find patients taking lithium have 3.5× lower chances of dying at a given age.’ aging-us.com/article/204476… This is a study from the always-fascinating UK Biobank (long live projects designed to collect huge amounts of data and link it to thousands of medical records!).

Lithium is sometimes used as a therapy for depression, so they looked at patients with mood disorders taking it.

Fauci says he didn’t expect covid to go on this long or claim as many lives.

This is why we should take this and future pandemics more seriously: it IS very hard to understand their enormous potential effects, and this was pandemic easy mode… cnbc.com/2022/11/22/fau… This isn’t a ‘haha, called it’…I’m not really sure what I thought in say February or March 2020. But the very fact I (and apparently very senior policymakers!) didn’t have a good mental model for covid’s consequences is a reason that we should err on the side of caution…

This subscription model to unlock features in physical products is absolutely appalling. Not just crap for consumers, but the environment too: wasting resources building features that also make the car heavier etc but may never actually be used! theverge.com/2022/7/12/2320… Also, describing $1200/year as a ‘microtransaction’ is a bit much gizmodo.com/mercedes-elect…

2500 retweets.

Let’s take a look at what this guy is claiming. Has Bryan really become five years younger in a matter of months? And does his strategy make sense?

THREAD

https://twitter.com/maxhertan/status/1595213398358171649

First, in what sense is he ‘five years younger’? Well, he did A LOT of different tests, and many things change with age, so you can see how you compare to other people of age x doing test y.

These are his results: (via blueprint.bryanjohnson.co)