Hacker News Reader

Comment by IceHegel | Hacker News Reader

There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any side effects.

View on HN

Taurine and Vitamin E are readily available and seem prudent.

For melatonin, tryptophan plus niacin would maximize the serotonin pathway (note this is dangerous when used with SSRIs).

How many of these are easily available? I had no idea that royal jelly is sold as a supplement.

Don’t listen to this stuff, he sounds so confident but it’s like he’s stapled together info nuggets. This isn’t like a thing people know with certainty.

Of the prescription options, estradiol is probably the most common and easily available, between hormonal birth control and HRT.

It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis.

Despite this, there is not really any clear evidence that it increases life expectancy.

Estradiol should not be supplemented for men.

Helps this masculine man. Low E2 is one of the most awful experiences.

Estradiol isn’t very well studied. It may be used for a few years in menopause, only in rare cases off-label, otherwise. Scientific and commercial interest seems pretty non existent. Probably because patentable synthetic derivatives historically fared worse risk-wise, than bioidentical estrogens, and the market outside of menopause issues is too small. Research on trans people, who would make interesting study subjects for hormonal matters, just got outlawed in the US.

Hormonal contraceptives typically do not contain estradiol, but ethinylestradiol and/or progestins.

I was going to note that a relatively large sample group has been taking estradiol en masse for many years, but you rightly called out that studying trans folks is now forbidden in the US. A shame, we could have offered up quite a bit of knowledge on it.

Estradiol is _extremely_ well studied, including non-HRT in AFAB/AMAB cisgender eugonadal populations

Birth control uses Ethinyl Estradiol which, despite the name, is not actually Estradiol and so does not undergo the same metabolic pathways and metabolites production

I know this because I recently had to source exogenous Estradiol for my wife after making this same mistaken assumption and being surprised at bloodwork and lack of improvement

> I had no idea that royal jelly is sold as a supplement.

Given that actual honey on the shelf is often mere sugar water, and people buy chakra-alignment crystals online, what about the idea surprises you?

There's also a fascinating tension with physical exercise, which is that your preference would obviously be do it as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But doing exercise while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any injuries.

That said, even with risk of injuries it feels like a no brainer to be active and to be active from an early age.

Also I don’t think people should wait until their late 50ies to make sure they get enough vitamin c to “avoid sacrificing their 20ies”

If we really manage to crack the code on aging, How certain are we that it's merely something to be delayed? Apparent age is at least somewhat reversible via lifestyle factors e.g. diet/exercise/sobriety.

In fact that's Aubrey de Grey's approach: rather than trying to figure out all the complicated processes involved in causing the damage in the first place, so you can slow them down, just directly fix the damage afterwards. There's been quite a bit of research on this.

de Grey is not using sobriety as a lifestyle factor to reverse anything I'm pretty sure.

A question - why hasn't Aubrey de Grey been more successful in getting some tech billionaire to fund his research agenda? He seems charismatic and smart, and had some promising ideas.

I presume, death by accident becomes a statistical certainty rather quickly.

Especially selegiline, MAOIs are dicey business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com