Can This Trendy Anti-Aging Treatment Really Help You Live Longer?
news article · 2025
LINK
SUMMARY
New York Times (Well section) report of 28 May 2025 on the Circulate Health / Buck Institute therapeutic-plasma-exchange trial published the same day in Aging Cell. It records the trial's own terms (42 participants, average age 65; albumin, albumin-plus-antibody, and saline-placebo arms; biological-age measured by multiple clocks; ~2.6-year biological-age reduction in the antibody arm, ~1 year in the albumin-only arm, age acceleration in the placebo arm) and notes the trial was sponsored by Circulate Health and co-authored by Eric Verdin, a Circulate co-founder and head of its scientific advisory board. The article is this bundle's anchor for the present-day independent expert critique of the commercialized protocol. It quotes Dr. Jeffrey Winters, chair of transfusion medicine at the Mayo Clinic, that the trial was too small to prove anti-aging benefits, that the short (a-few-months) follow-up leaves the durability of any effect unclear, that plasma exchange carries procedure risks (e.g. machine failure damaging red blood cells and inducing anemia), and that 'given the absence of evidence in the literature' the longevity benefit 'really isn't there.' It also quotes Dr. Katayoun Fani (Katoun Fomani), associate professor and blood-bank medical director at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that the anti-aging benefit for healthy people has never been proven in large clinical trials and that the procedure exposes patients to risk without a clear payoff; and Dr. Zbigniew Szczepiorkowski, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Dartmouth Health, that the findings may be confounded by the healthy Bay-Area cohort Circulate recruited. The named-quote attributions and the headline/date are copied from the fetched article; the trial's own numbers are cross-checked against the Aging Cell paper and the Buck Institute release already in this bundle.
NOTES
The New York Times’s 28 May 2025 Well report on the Circulate Health / Buck Institute therapeutic-plasma-exchange trial is this case’s anchor for the present-day independent critique of the commercialized protocol. Dr. Jeffrey Winters, chair of transfusion medicine at the Mayo Clinic, told the Times the trial was too small to prove anti-aging benefits and did not follow subjects beyond a few months, leaving the durability of any effect unclear, and that ‘given the absence of evidence in the literature’ the longevity benefit ‘really isn’t there.’ Dr. Katayoun Fani of the University of Alabama at Birmingham said the anti-aging benefit for healthy people has never been proven in large trials and that the procedure carries risk without a clear payoff, and Dr. Zbigniew Szczepiorkowski of Dartmouth Health noted the results may be confounded by the healthy Bay-Area cohort the company recruited. The headline, date, and quote attributions were copied from the fetched article; the trial’s own figures are cross-checked against the Aging Cell paper and the Buck Institute release in this bundle.