Lifespan is how long you live. Healthspan is how long you live without disease or disability. In most high-income countries the gap between them is around a decade — ten years spent managing conditions rather than living around them. Longevity medicine targets the gap, not the endpoint.
Anti-ageing and longevity are not the same thing
The two words are used interchangeably in marketing. Clinically they describe different work.
| Anti-ageing | Longevity medicine | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary target | Appearance | Function and disease risk |
| Typical measure | Before-and-after photographs | Biomarkers, imaging, performance |
| Time horizon | Weeks | Years to decades |
| Success looks like | Looking younger | Same tests, better numbers, repeatedly |
| Evidence base | Mixed, largely aesthetic | Epidemiology and clinical trials |
We offer aesthetic work, and we are good at it. We simply do not present it as life extension.
Ageing as a set of mechanisms
The useful reframing is that ageing is not one process but several measurable ones: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, loss of muscle mass, mitochondrial decline, vascular stiffening, hormonal drift, sleep fragmentation and immune ageing among them. Some are highly modifiable. Some, currently, are not.
What “biological age” is and is not
It is a statistical estimate of your rate of ageing, derived from DNA methylation patterns. It is a genuinely useful trend line. It is not a diagnosis, it varies between the published clocks, and anyone selling it as a single verdict is overselling it.
How we use it. Same clock, same laboratory, same time of day, repeated annually. The direction of travel is the finding; the number on its own is not.