Would would you do to shave 10 years off your biological age? Photo / Getty Images
Longevity clinics designed to slow down ageing are springing up to service the uber-wealthy, but can their methods help the rest of us?
What if somebody told you that you could shave 10 years off your biological age? Not by taking a magic pill – although pills may be part of the picture – but by overhauling your lifestyle and rigorously tracking your health data.
This, according to Lev Mikheev and his daughter, Kate Woolhouse, is the future of healthcare. Rather than simply accepting that as we age we inevitably begin an inexorable descent into decrepitude and illness, they have an alternative option. It involves taking back control of our bodies.
I am sitting in a sun-lit upstairs room in Hooke, their exclusive health clinic in Mayfair, London, drinking a double espresso (a good choice of coffee, apparently) and what I assume is not tap water but something more expensive, and discussing how far I could roll back my own biological (if not chronological) age.
Could I rewind five years? “Yes,” says Woolhouse, a former intellectual property lawyer who is now the chief executive of the clinic. “And from a scientific point of view, that is linked to better health outcomes.”
What about returning my body to its 20-year-old state? Could I go that far? They’re less sure about that. But the point is we can change our ageing trajectory if we are willing to invest the effort – and, for Hooke members, the money.
Launched in 2019 by Moscow-born Mikheev, a theoretical physicist turned hedge fund manager, the clinic has been open – to the very affluent – since December. It has more in common, aesthetically, with a high-end spa than your average NHS clinical setting. Which is intentional. “Sometimes people don’t want to [get checked] because they’re scared of what they’ll find and scared of doctors,” says Woolhouse. “That’s why we try to make this place look so nice – you get less of that white coat syndrome.”
The idea behind all this tasteful decor is that “everyone’s life can be enhanced and extended by thoughtful application of the modern life sciences”.
Put more simply: prevention is better than cure.
To the average health-conscious person, prevention might mean a Mediterranean diet and regular exercise. But for the Hooke member it is far more numerical, methodical and personalised.
For an initial fee of £15,000 ($31,000), a comprehensive “investigation” is carried out. This includes an ultrasound of major organs, a colonoscopy, endoscopy, blood test, mammogram, electrocardio-gram and whole genome sequencing, among other tests.
Such tests have themselves become a lucrative business more widely, with private health screening now offered by a string of UK clinics, all offering what is marketed as an MOT for your body. But while GPs largely agree on the benefits of patients taking responsibility for their own health, some have warned of a potential downside to all this private testing: namely, what happens when the patient, armed with a result outside the normal range, presents to the NHS seeking answers. Sometimes their concerns will be warranted. Other times, less so, and while the NHS untangles this, private providers profit.
But Hooke goes beyond the kind of screening you might see advertised on your commute. Its target audience is not so much the middle-earning worried well as the high-net-worth individual willing to spend big money on extending their healthy lifespan and life expectancy.
The methods of the longevity-focused super-rich vary, from self-experiments with gene therapy by Brian Hanley, an American mathematical biologist, (he believes living to 160 is possible) to the battle by Bryan Johnson – a Silicon Valley tech mogul – to defeat biological ageing and turn his 45-year-old organs into those of an 18-year-old (with the help of 30 doctors and experts). But beyond these outliers there’s a growing number of well-heeled longevity-seekers keen to turn back the clock. According to Allied Market Research, longevity is expected to be a US$44 billion ($70 billion) market globally by 2030.
Typical of the clinics operating in this market is a comprehensive assessment of the sort provided by Hooke. “We gather as much data as we can about each of our clients,” says Woolhouse, because data is crucial here – in particular the direction in which your numbers are moving.
“Trajectory is the most important thing,” says Woolhouse. “It’s not the spot check – [that] will give you a certain level of comfort that things are probably more or less OK – but coming in regularly and letting us gather more data about you allows us to track your progress and see if you’re improving, getting worse, or if something is moving in a way that is worth investigating.”
This enables Hooke’s clinicians – who include Dr David Porter, a former men’s first-team doctor at Chelsea FC, and Prof Pierre-Marc Bouloux, a leading endocrinologist – to spot potential problems far earlier than they might be spotted by an overrun NHS or, indeed, your average private health assessment, and to conduct further tests or take action. A Minority Report-style system, then, where illness can be predicted before it has appeared.
There is also a fitness assessment, a meeting with Hooke’s nutritionist to discuss diet, a cognitive function test and a brain-health assessment. When the results come back, the client discusses them with the Hooke team and decides what their “focus areas” should be.
“Obviously, when we look at them inside and out, we find a lot of things they can be working on,” says Woolhouse. “But no one is going to action 25 things in six or 12 months. We have to choose which are the most important.”
Armed with all this personal health data, the client is offered an annual programme, starting at £22,000 ($45,000) and rising to £60,000 ($124,000) for a package that includes unlimited consultations, weekly training sessions and a personalised nutrition programme. The aim is to prevent age-related diseases including cancer, dementia and cardiovascular disease. The means: a rigorous and tailored nutrition and training programme, accompanied by dietary supplementation.
So who are the members? Who can afford to spend such sums on their health? “They tend to be successful business people who are taking time to focus on their lives or who don’t have much time and they want to bring all their healthcare under one roof,” says Woolhouse. “We’re quite family-focused. We thought we’d skew more towards a biohacker in his 50s, but a lot of the time we’ve found it’s couples who sign up, then bring their adult children in.”
They tend to be “international”, meaning jet-setters who split their time between London, the US and elsewhere. Hooke’s promise to clients is to help them make their later years “the happiest, healthiest and most productive” of their life. But not everyone is waiting until their later years to join: one of their youngest members is 25. At the other end of the age range is a 70-year-old. Because 70, says Mikheev, is not too late to make changes: “A reasonably healthy 70-year-old is certainly our territory, no question.”
Mikheev himself is a healthy 60-year-old, with the appearance of a healthy 50-year-old. His career includes a stint at the former New York investment bank Salomon Brothers and managing hedge fund portfolios in London. His own health epiphany struck about a decade ago. A lonely, bookish and not especially active child, he was overweight by the time he turned 10. He played a little football as he grew older and became “reasonably fit but not amazing.”
Then, in midlife, he came across the work of two American doctors who profoundly changed the way he thought about health and ageing. One was the late Dr Henry S Lodge, who co-wrote a series of books called Younger Next Year, advocating exercising six days a week for the rest of your life and strength training twice a week. The other was Dr Peter Attia, whose bestselling book Outlive is billed as an operating manual for longevity. Mikheev shares Dr Attia’s belief that a “personalised, proactive strategy” is required.
His own strategy includes running in summer and Nordic skiing in winter. Having started regular endurance training at 48, he achieved a new personal best over 10km at 58. He’s been doing yoga for most of his life and lately took up rowing.
Nutrition-wise, he limits easy sugars and carbohydrates and eats a diet rich in meat, fish and vegetables. Alcohol, perhaps surprisingly, is “the one vice I do have. I think up to two glasses of wine a day is probably OK, if not every day.”
He sleeps six and a half hours a night (less than the recommended seven to nine). But the important thing, he says, is “really listening to yourself and learning to interpret the signals”.
Arguably, this is easier if you’re tracking all your data using tech. All Hooke members are offered wearable devices to enable continuous monitoring of everything from glucose levels, sleep and activity to heart rate.
Almost everyone who works at the clinic practises intermittent fasting, the fashionable approach to eating, which research suggests may help control weight and prevent disease. But they don’t necessarily recommend it to every member. Nor would you expect them to, in a clinic that favours the personalised approach.
If it sounds unreachable for most of us, Mikheev is hopeful that the ideas he’s espousing will filter down to our “broken” public healthcare system.
“Healthcare needs to change and you have to start somewhere,” he says.
He would like to see public healthcare providers become less wasteful with our personal health data, most of which he worries is sitting in dusty files in hospitals, doing nothing useful. Tracking it properly, under a prevention-oriented healthcare model, is the future he and Woolhouse fervently believe in.
“There will be a revolution,” predicts the ever-optimistic Mikheev. “Hopefully soon. But setting up this [health] baseline for yourself is extremely important. That’s how you come to identify who you are.”
Track your health data
This can be done for hundreds, rather than thousands, of pounds. This year, the Telegraph’s round-up of the best fitness trackers included the Garmin Venu 2 Plus, Fitbit Versa 4 and, for runners, Coros Pace 2. As a budget option, the Mi Smart Band 6 is just £39.99.
Practise intermittent fasting
It doesn’t have to be extreme. Research suggests that skipping or delaying breakfast could help with weight loss and reduction in abdominal visceral fat.
Exercise is everything
You don’t need to join an expensive gym. Just walking a couple of miles a day will improve your life trajectory, and strength training once or twice a week will prevent frailty in old age.
Don’t neglect your brain health
Keeping your brain active as you age can help reduce your risk of dementia. Be engaged with new things.
Telegraph: The optimum diet for healthy ageing involves a variety of carbs.