What is longevity medicine, and where does the evidence stand?

Longevity medicine is a clinical approach that tries to keep people healthy for longer, rather than waiting to treat disease once it appears. Andrea Maier, president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, described healthy longevity medicine to MIT Technology Review in 2024 as optimizing health and healthspan while antagonizing aging processes across the lifespan.

The field is open about the fact that this is still a working definition. In a 2022 interview, the society's vice president, Evelyne Bischof, said there is no consensus and nobody claims to have the ultimate definition. A 2024 white paper from the first Longevity Clinics Roundtable, hosted by the Buck Institute, states that healthy longevity medicine is not an official medical branch and has no practice guidelines yet.

Lifespan is how long a person lives. Healthspan is how long they live in good health. The World Health Organization measures the second with healthy life expectancy (HALE), the average number of years a person can expect to live in full health, given the rates of death and illness in their population at the time.

The distance between the two is growing. In a 2024 study in JAMA Network Open, Armin Garmany and Andre Terzic of Mayo Clinic compared life expectancy and healthy life expectancy across 183 WHO member states using WHO data.

That gap is the core argument for longevity medicine. The goal is not mainly a longer life but more of it spent well. The Roundtable white paper makes the same point: the field's primary focus is healthspan, not lifespan.

Longevity medicine draws on geroscience, the research field that studies aging as a driver of chronic disease. In its coverage of the 2023 NIH Geroscience Summit, the NIH Catalyst describes geroscience as the search for ways to translate knowledge of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of aging into better health later in life, founded on the observation that age is the major risk factor for many diseases. The same coverage notes that clinicians have no universally accepted meaning for geroscience itself, which hinders the design of clinical trials and, in turn, direct clinical use.

One framework the field uses is the hallmarks of aging. In a 2023 review in Cell, López-Otín and colleagues proposed twelve interconnected hallmarks, including genomic instability, telomere attrition and chronic inflammation, each meeting three premises: it appears with age, accentuating it experimentally accelerates aging, and intervening on it offers a chance to slow, stop or reverse aging.

A longevity clinic is a practice that delivers this model of care, usually on a cash-pay basis. The Roundtable white paper describes a common pattern across clinics:

1. A comprehensive baseline assessment. Medical history, physical and psychological health, blood work and, at some clinics, tests related to the hallmarks of aging or biological age.
2. A personalized action plan. Lifestyle changes, possible interventions and a schedule for re-testing.
3. Follow-up and re-testing. Some clinics use health coaches, others enroll patients in longer programs with regular physician check-ins.
4. Reassessment. Comparing new results with the baseline to see what changed.

MIT Technology Review reported in 2024 that testing sessions at many clinics take four to six hours and can include blood work, body composition, VO2 max, cognitive assessments and sometimes genome or microbiome analysis. A 2025 survey of 82 clinics, reported by the same publication, found that more than 80% were overseen by a medical doctor with over ten years of clinical experience, and that 28% offered Botox and 38% offered facial rejuvenation procedures. Andrea Maier wrote that the line between longevity and aesthetic medicine remains blurred.

If you are planning a practice of your own, our guide on how to start a longevity clinic covers the model, team, compliance and software decisions.

Longevity medicine is often described as evidence-based, and parts of it are. Other parts are early. A 2024 narrative review in Frontiers in Aging, Climbing the longevity pyramid, sorts interventions into levels that make the difference easy to see.

Reporting on the field points the same way. MIT Technology Review wrote in 2025 that no drugs or supplements have yet been proved to extend human lifespan. Its 2024 article reported that many clinics use aging clocks even though they do not work well, citing a test in which one blood sample sent to ten companies came back with estimated biological ages from 25 to 66. The Roundtable white paper also warns that advanced diagnostics, such as AI-driven MRI scans, carry a real risk of overdiagnosis and false positives that lead to unnecessary procedures, cost and stress.

• Prefer markers with established clinical meaning. Our biomarker library covers what current guidelines say about markers such as ApoB, Lp(a) and HOMA-IR.
• Document your ranges. If your clinic grades results against target ranges that differ from the lab's reference intervals, write down where each one came from. Our explainer on optimal vs reference ranges covers how.
• Measure over time. One result is a snapshot. The value of the model is in the trend after a change in the plan.
• Test with a reason. Add imaging or advanced panels when the result will change a decision, not because it is available.
• Separate evidence tiers in conversations with patients. Be clear about what is well supported and what is experimental.
• Do not promise outcomes. Describe what you measure and how you follow up.

Longevity medicine runs on repeated measurement, so the record has to handle data over years, not just a single visit. Results arrive from different labs, have to be graded against the clinic's own ranges, and need to change the patient's plan when they move.

That is the loop LongevityEHR is built around. AI lab extraction turns lab PDFs into structured values that a provider reviews before release. Biomarker tracking grades each value against ranges your clinic sets and shows it as a trend. Care plans turn the result into steps the patient follows in your branded portal. Classification against your ranges is deterministic, and the interpretation is always written by your clinicians. The software does not interpret results or make clinical decisions.