The London Longevity Newsletter — Issue 08

Welcome to Issue 08 of the London Longevity Newsletter 🗞️

As always, we’re back with an interesting mix of updates to be on top of in this space. Let’s jump right in 📬🧪

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT 🧬

• Have we just found the first anti-aging drug for humans?

  In a post-hoc analysis of a phase 2b trial, semaglutide (Ozempic) slowed epigenetic age in adults with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy. These findings provide the first clinical-trial evidence that a GLP-1 receptor agonist may slow biological aging across different organs (figure below), supporting its potential for health-span extension. But, it’s good to keep in mind that the main result was epigenetic clock age estimate improvement vs controls, and these people weren’t healthy to begin with. Read more

  

• Should we save lithium for our brains, not just our phones?

  A major new Nature study from Harvard found lithium deficiency in the prefrontal cortex and amyloid plaques of people with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers measured 27 metals in brain and blood, but only lithium stood out. In mice, a lithium-depleted diet worsened amyloid and tau pathology, increased toxic oligomers, and sped up memory decline. What’s interesting is that lithium salts matter, lithium orotate is much more effective than other organic or inorganic salts (figure below). These findings may now reinvigorate scientific interest in lithium as a potential Alzheimer’s therapy. Just hold off on taking lithium supplements for now. Read more

  

• Can 5 minutes of your voice reveal serious mental illness?

  Researchers remotely gathered 20 minutes of speech and demographics from 1,140 participants across healthy controls and people with different mental health disorders and trained an ML model with this data. With just 5 minutes of speech, the model distinguished healthy controls from serious mental illness with 86% accuracy, and achieved similar accuracy in multi-class psychosis-spectrum classification. These results show automated, remote speech analysis can accurately detect and differentiate mental disorders, though further clinical validation is needed. Read more

• Did you know there’s no direct way to measure insulin inside the body without drawing blood?

  A new study tested a skin patch with tiny antibody-coated needles that can measure insulin levels directly in rats and the stabilized antibodies even survived UV and gamma-ray sterilisation. Using the patch, researchers found that disrupted circadian rhythms impaired insulin absorption. Read more

• When Your Immune System

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