Why this journal exists
Ageing research has a communication problem that is structural rather than accidental. The science is genuinely interesting, the outcomes of interest take decades to measure, and a large consumer market has grown up in the gap between what has been shown and what is being sold.
Into that gap flows a particular kind of writing: a real mechanism described accurately, a laboratory finding reported faithfully, and then a silent step to a conclusion about human health that nobody has tested. Each sentence is defensible. The paragraph is not.
This journal exists to make that step visible every time it occurs. It does so by grading the claim rather than the field, stating the grade at the top of every review, and setting out in advance what evidence would move it.
What we publish
Two kinds of page. Reviews assess a single claim about an intervention or a marker, carry a grade, and follow the same structure throughout: the claim, the mechanism and how well it is established, the human evidence, the limitations, and what would change the grade. Explainers cover method rather than substance: how to read a trial, why surrogate endpoints mislead, what a biological age test measures, how supplements are regulated here.
We cover fewer topics than we could, deliberately. A short list of reviews maintained properly is worth more than a large library that is never revisited, and every graded page carries a commitment to re-examine it.
How we write about evidence
We describe literatures qualitatively. A review will tell you that trials in a field are small, short, conducted in healthy volunteers, funded by manufacturers and not independently replicated. It will not name a study, an author, a journal, a sample size or a result.
That is a considered constraint. Naming a single trial invites the reader to treat it as decisive, which is precisely the error good appraisal exists to prevent. Quoting a number from a summary lends a precision that a summary cannot support. What a reader actually needs, in order to decide how much weight to place on a field, is the shape of its evidence base, and that is what we supply. Where readers want the primary literature, we point to the institutional indexes where it lives and can be read in full.
Every review links to institution-level sources only: the national appraisal body, the health service, the medicines regulator, the systematic review library, the national literature index and the international bodies. No review links to a supplement seller, a clinic, a private testing company or anyone with a commercial interest in a grade, and no graded page carries an outbound link to a commercial organisation of any kind.
Independence
No pharmaceutical company, supplement manufacturer, clinic, laboratory or testing service funds this journal, pays for coverage, or sees a grade before publication. We take no affiliate commission, sell no placement and run no sponsored content. There is nothing to buy on this site.
The full position, including how we handle corrections and what we do when we are wrong, is set out in the editorial policy.
What this journal is not
It is not a clinical service and it gives no medical advice. It does not diagnose, treat, recommend, or discuss doses. Several of the interventions covered here are prescription only medicines licensed for other conditions, and decisions about them belong to a registered doctor with access to a patient's history.
It is not a wellness publication. It carries no protocols, no routines, no supplement stacks and no personal regimens. Where the evidence supports nothing, we say that the evidence supports nothing, which makes for less compelling reading than the alternative and is the entire point.
Published by Northbank Media. Correspondence and corrections through the contact page.