From Bryan Johnson-style biohacking and peptide therapies to GLP-1 drugs, UAE doctors distinguish evidence-backed longevity treatments from costly hype.
Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson reportedly spends millions of dollars each year attempting to optimise his health and slow the ageing process. But UAE doctors say most people do not need an expensive regimen of supplements, tests and experimental treatments to improve their prospects of living longer and healthier.
The strongest evidence for extending healthspan remains relatively straightforward: regular cardiovascular exercise, strength training, sufficient sleep, healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, good blood-sugar control and avoiding smoking.
At the same time, the booming longevity industry is giving consumers access to an increasingly sophisticated range of peptides, IV infusions, biological-age tests, supplements and experimental therapies — many of which have yet to be supported by strong clinical evidence.
“Most of what actually works is subtraction and consistency,” said Dr Ihsan Almarzooqi, co-founder of Metabolic.
“Sleeping properly, not smoking, staying physically active and getting your health numbers checked regularly — it may not be as compelling, but it is what the evidence supports.”
Dr Allison C. Herbert, a staff physician in the Preventive Medicine Department at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, similarly stressed that no single treatment, supplement or test can replace the fundamentals of preventive healthcare.
“Healthy ageing is the result of managing multiple aspects of health consistently over time,” she said.
What doctors say is worth the money
For people looking to invest in their long-term health, doctors recommend focusing first on identifying and managing individual risk factors rather than chasing the latest longevity trend.
Herbert said prevention should remain at the heart of healthy ageing. This includes assessing cardiovascular and metabolic risks, monitoring cholesterol and blood sugar, undergoing appropriate cancer screenings and evaluating body composition.
Regular physical activity — including both strength and cardiovascular exercise — combined with a balanced diet also has strong evidence supporting its role in healthy ageing, she said.
Ali Hashemi, co-founder of Metabolic, said the strongest evidence for healthy longevity currently centres on cardiorespiratory fitness, resistance training, preserving bone density and muscle mass, improving sleep and treating sleep apnoea, avoiding smoking, controlling blood pressure, lowering ApoB cholesterol and maintaining healthy blood-sugar levels.
“Cardiorespiratory fitness. The association with all-cause mortality is stronger than anything else we measure,” he said.
Hashemi also highlighted GLP-1 receptor agonists, arguing that their role in the longevity conversation now extends beyond weight management.
“GLP-1 receptor agonists belong here now. Not because of weight loss, but because we have cardiovascular outcome data,” he said.
He noted that this reflects a significantly higher standard of evidence than that available for many of the treatments and interventions currently marketed within the booming longevity industry.
Treatments doctors urge caution over
Among the interventions Almarzooqi believes are receiving more attention than the evidence warrants are exosome therapies, some peptides, high-dose NAD+ infusions promoted as ways to reverse cellular ageing and biological-age supplement packages based on limited observational data.
“These sit on evidence levels most patients would never accept if we actually showed them the source,” he said.
Herbert also urged caution around stem-cell treatments offered outside established clinical settings, IV vitamin therapies without a documented deficiency, peptide treatments and supplements marketed for “cellular rejuvenation”.
“Popularity should not be confused with evidence,” she said.
Almarzooqi said several popular longevity treatments do not yet have sufficient evidence to support routine use among healthy people.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has established medical applications, including wound healing and decompression sickness, but evidence for using it to promote longevity in otherwise healthy people remains limited.
Red-light therapy has shown some early promise in areas such as skin health and inflammation, but does not currently support the broader anti-ageing claims often attached to it.
NAD+ therapies are another example where marketing may be running ahead of the available data, particularly when high doses are promoted at premium prices for anti-ageing purposes.
Similarly, routine IV vitamin infusions have little justification for healthy adults who do not have a documented deficiency.
Biological age: useful measure or expensive gimmick?
Biological-age testing has become a major part of the longevity industry, with consumers offered tests that claim to determine whether their bodies are biologically younger or older than their chronological age.
But Almarzooqi said such tests are often “marketed beyond the evidence”.
Epigenetic clocks are frequently designed to study population-level trends rather than guide treatment for individual patients, and their margins of error can make a single biological-age score unsuitable for clinical decision-making.
“The other issue is what the number gets used to sell something,” he said.
Marketing may suggest that supplements or infusions can lower a person’s biological age, while the interventions with the strongest evidence for improving health outcomes remain familiar ones: exercise, sleep, nutrition and avoiding smoking.
For healthy adults, Almarzooqi said more useful measures can include blood pressure, ApoB cholesterol, HbA1c, resting heart rate, waist circumference, sleep-apnoea assessment, body composition and fitness.
But he cautioned that more testing does not automatically mean better healthcare.
A healthy person without symptoms or a specific family-history concern may not need a comprehensive genetic panel, whole-body MRI or extensive hormone testing simply because these are offered as part of a longevity package.
“More data isn’t automatically more useful. Sometimes it’s just more noise,” he said.
Peptides: promising science or hype?
Peptides are particularly complicated because the category includes both established medicines and experimental treatments.
“GLP-1s are the obvious example, and they’re peptides, which people forget,” Almarzooqi said.
However, many peptides marketed specifically for longevity are supported only by animal research, early human studies or other preliminary evidence.
His clinic grades peptides according to the strength of the available evidence, ranging from approved clinical trials to early-stage research and expert opinion.
“The point isn’t to be purist about it. It’s so a patient knows whether they’re getting something with a real trial behind it or something genuinely promising but still early,” he said.
Safety is another concern. Almarzooqi warned that people obtaining peptides outside tightly controlled medical settings may not know exactly what a product contains.
“Contamination, wrong dosing, or an entirely different substance can end up in something sold with complete confidence,” he said.
He recommended establishing a baseline, using an intervention only when clinically appropriate and then measuring outcomes rather than relying entirely on how someone feels.
“That loop, baseline, intervention, remeasurement, is the whole difference between a peptide being a legitimate part of someone’s care and being a guess with a fancier name,” he said.
Why younger adults are turning to longevity medicine
The longevity market is increasingly attracting people in their 20s and 30s, with Almarzooqi reporting a rise in younger patients seeking preventive care.
He said their motivation is often less about trying to live to 120 and more about avoiding diseases that affected their parents.
“A lot of them have watched a parent get a diagnosis in their fifties that had been building quietly for twenty years, and they’d rather know now than find out the same way,” he said.
Herbert said millennials and Gen Z are also showing greater interest in understanding their health before symptoms or disease appear.
The aim, she said, should not simply be to extend lifespan, but to preserve good health, function and independence for as long as possible.
The Bryan Johnson effect
Social media has helped push longevity into the mainstream, with high-profile figures such as Bryan Johnson showcasing intensive programmes involving testing, supplements, diet and other interventions.
But Almarzooqi cautioned against assuming that an extreme routine developed for a highly resourced individual can simply be replicated by everyone.
“The extreme, highly resourced routines you see online are not medicine you can extrapolate from,” he said.
“What works for someone with a full-time team, unlimited testing, and one single patient to optimise — which is themselves, i.e. Bryan Johnson — doesn’t translate cleanly to a protocol for a general population.”
Social media, he said, is often the starting point for patients, who subsequently arrive at clinics asking about peptides, supplements, scans or protocols they have encountered online.
He also noted that many influencers discussing longevity do not have formal scientific training.
The biggest misconception, he said, is that longevity medicine means doing more.
More supplements, tests, data and overlapping protocols do not necessarily produce better outcomes.
How much does longevity care cost?
The cost of longevity-focused care varies significantly depending on the services involved. Hashemi said a high-end clinic could charge between Dh30,000 and Dh60,000 for an annual prediabetes-reversal or weight-management programme.
However, he said the price should be considered in the context of what is actually being treated.
Much of Metabolic’s care can be covered by insurance because it falls within conventional medical treatment rather than purely preventive wellness.
“Diagnostics, cardiology, endocrinology, chronic disease management. These are covered, because payers already recognise them as medicine,” Hashemi said.
He argued that longevity care can appear to be a luxury product partly because services outside insurance systems must be sold directly to consumers.
“Anything that has to be sold starts to take on the aesthetics of a luxury good, whatever its actual clinical value,” he said.
There is no single longevity treatment
For Herbert, the central message is simple: healthy ageing cannot be achieved through one treatment.
Maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness can help reduce the risks of frailty, metabolic disease and loss of independence. A nutrient-rich diet, adequate sleep, avoiding tobacco and maintaining meaningful social connections also contribute to long-term health.
“The challenge is often not knowing what to do, but having the right support to sustain these habits over time,” she said.
Almarzooqi said much of what is sold under the banner of longevity is ultimately conventional preventive medicine combined with better diagnostics and follow-up.
“We didn’t invent blood pressure control or resistance training, we just started calling it something with better branding,” he said.
For consumers navigating the expanding longevity market, his advice is to establish what health problems or risk factors actually exist before deciding what needs to be added.
“Get a real baseline, see where you actually stand, and then the additions and subtractions that make sense for you become obvious rather than guessed at,” he said.
The doctors’ broader message is that effective longevity medicine may be far less futuristic than the industry suggests: identify risks early, address them consistently and do not mistake a higher price or more complicated treatment plan for better healthcare.
