The question “are they worth it”? is something that is obviously very hard to determine for supplements and likely varies a great deal from person to person.
I’m fine with discussions like this, but Alex please keep in mind that this isn’t Quora, (for those who don’t know Alex, he was the #1 Question writer on Quora back when it was popular). In fact Alex is pretty Internet Famous on Quora - see below. So Alex is very good at asking questions… unfortunately we aren’t all necessarily that good at answering his questions.
Some of the questions are highly unlikely to get much of a response because they are so narrow a question.
Getting back to the issue of “are they worth it”? I think at some point it would be valuable to quantify things, at least for well-known longevity drugs to help people prioritize interventions.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while - and when I have time may follow up on it, but it seems we need to develop a simple measure of an interventions cost-effectiveness.
I’m thinking something like this… for rapamycin for example (and this is just at the concept stage):
What I’m trying to get at is a sort of “Cost per QALY” calculation that we can use to compare and prioritize longevity drugs over time.
Rapamycin Cost/QALY Example:
Cost per year for average dosing: 6mg/week, $1.50 per mg price = Approx. $500/year
Number of years you’d have to take the dosing: assume Avg starting Age: 40 (adjust as you see fit)
40 Years of Rapamycin: $20,000
Avg. percent lifespan increase seen in model organisms: 15% to 30%. (higher doses map to higher longevity, so perhaps we need to adjust the cost/year to map to the percent lifespan increase)
Average Human Lifespan (no rapamycin): 80 (placeholder, adjust or personalize as needed)
Expected increase in human lifespan years (range): 12 years to 24 years
Cost per added year of life using rapamycin: $1,600 to $800
Obviously this is an oversimplification because higher doses are going to cost more, and also be more likely to increase the lifespan benefit. I give this as only a basic example of how we can come to the cost/effectivenesss of these longevity drugs and supplements to answer the question “Are they worth it?” and help us prioritize.
Since we dont’ have that much data on the spirulina products, we probably couldn’t do the calcs on that supplement. But we do have data on NRF2 promoters like Moringa (The ITP studies had good results with Protandim which is an NRF2 promoter) so perhaps something could be roughed out for it.
