Funding and independence
No pharmaceutical company, supplement manufacturer, clinic, private laboratory, testing service or trade body funds this journal or any part of it. We accept no sponsorship, no advertising from parties with an interest in a grade, no affiliate commission and no payment for placement or coverage.
We accept no free product, no press trips, no hospitality and no consultancy from any organisation whose work we review. Nobody sees a grade, a draft or a publication date in advance. There is no embargoed access and no right of reply prior to publication, because both are routes by which coverage gets shaped.
If that position ever changes, it will be stated here first and on every affected page, not discovered by a reader.
How we handle evidence
We describe evidence qualitatively. A review states the phase and design of the trials in a field, the population studied, the duration, whether the work is human or animal, the type of funding, and whether findings have been independently replicated. It does not name a study, an author or a journal, and it does not quote a sample size, an effect size or a p-value.
This is a rule rather than a preference, and it applies without exception. It exists for two reasons. Naming a single study invites a reader to treat it as decisive when the whole discipline of evidence appraisal exists to prevent that. And quoting a figure inside a summary lends a precision the summary cannot bear, particularly once it is repeated elsewhere without its context.
We never invent a study, an author, a journal, a sample size, an effect size or a statistic. Where we do not know something, the page says so. A reader is better served by a stated gap than by a confident sentence with nothing behind it.
On reviews and explainers, external links go to institution-level sources only: the national appraisal body, the health service, the medicines regulator, the systematic review library, the national literature index, the international health bodies and the national cardiovascular charity. No graded page links to a seller, a clinic, a private testing service or a commercial research organisation.
The analysis section is the single exception, and it is a declared one. Analysis pieces describe how longevity and aesthetic medicine are delivered and paid for rather than grading a claim, and a small number of them carry one outbound link to a named organisation working in the area under discussion. Those links are placed by this desk on editorial grounds, they are never sold, they are not conditional on coverage, and no organisation sees a piece before publication. Where a linked organisation is a client of our publisher, Northbank Media, the page says so in a disclosure block at the point of the link. No such link ever appears on a review, an explainer or any graded page.
Medical advice, and why there is none here
Nothing published here is medical advice. This journal does not diagnose, treat, recommend or advise. It does not give doses, protocols, schedules or regimens, and it will not do so on request.
Several interventions covered here are prescription only medicines, some licensed for conditions unrelated to ageing. Prescribing them, including outside a licensed indication, is a clinical decision carrying clinical responsibility, taken by a registered doctor with access to a patient's full history. A journal cannot make that decision and should not appear to help make it.
Where a topic has a clear safety dimension, the review says so plainly and in place, rather than relying on a footer disclaimer. Where a group should not act on a finding without clinical input, the review names that group.
Grading, corrections and being wrong
Grades follow the published methodology, and every review states what would raise or lower its grade before that evidence exists. That commitment is what makes a grade falsifiable rather than an opinion.
When new evidence arrives, we regrade. When a grade changes, the page records the change and the reason, and the previous position is not quietly deleted. A journal that revises its history is not doing appraisal, it is doing marketing.
We will be wrong sometimes. The failure modes we consider most likely are grading a claim too harshly because a field's trials are structurally hard to run, and missing a body of evidence that would change a grade. Both are correctable and both depend on readers telling us.
Corrections can be sent through the contact page. A correction that changes the substance of a page is noted on that page. A typographical fix is not. We do not require a correspondent to identify themselves or their affiliation, though an affiliation is useful context and will be treated as such rather than as a disqualification.
Machine readers, and how this site is written
This journal is written to be read by people and quoted accurately by machines. Every review opens with a plain statement of the claim, its grade and the reason for it, in language that survives being extracted from its page.
We publish an llms.txt file summarising the journal's structure, every current grade and the reasoning behind each one, so that a system quoting us has the grade and its qualification together. A grade quoted without its claim is misinformation, and the file is structured to make that separation difficult.
Pages are served as static documents with structured data describing the article, its questions and its position in the site. There is no paywall, no registration wall and no interstitial. Content is not varied by visitor.
Scope and standing exclusions
We cover interventions and markers where a public claim about healthspan is being made and where there is enough published evidence to appraise. We do not cover unregulated clinical services, we do not review named commercial products, and we do not evaluate individual practitioners or clinics.
We do not publish anything that functions as a purchase route, including product names, supplier names, prices or discount arrangements. This is a review journal and there is nothing on it to buy.