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15 plain-language articles on anti-aging and cellular health — the physiology, the compounds, and what the evidence actually shows.
15 articles
Mitochondrial fatigue: the energy problem doctors miss
You sleep eight hours and wake up flat. Coffee gets you to noon, then you crash. Workouts that used to feel good now feel like work for three days afterward. Labs come back normal — thyroid in range, ferritin fine, B12 fine, CBC unremarkable — and the verdict is some version of "everything looks good, try to manage your stress." If you've been told you're always tired for no reason, the reason is usually real. It just isn't on the standard panel.
NAD+ and cellular aging in plain English
If you've spent any time inside the longevity conversation, you've heard the term. NAD+ is on every supplement shelf, in every podcast, on the cover of every popular-science book about aging. What it isn't, in most of those places, is explained — what it actually does inside a cell, why levels drop with age, and why that drop matters for how you feel and how you age. Here's the plain-English version.
The Bryan Johnson "Don't Die" phenomenon — what the protocol actually does and what it doesn't
In February 2023, a photograph of Bryan Johnson standing shirtless next to his 17-year-old son and his 70-year-old father circulated widely across social media. The premise was that Johnson, then 45, had biomarker readings suggesting his biological age was younger than his chronological age — and the photograph was offered as evidence of some kind of metabolic convergence across three generations. People reacted the way people react when something is simultaneously compelling and uncomfortable: they shared it while expressing ambivalence about whether they were supposed to find it inspiring or disturbing. Both responses were tracking something real.
Cellular senescence in deeper detail — the biology, biomarkers, and intervention frontier
A cell under severe stress faces a choice. It can repair the damage and carry on. It can trigger apoptosis — the orderly self-destruction program that eliminates compromised cells cleanly. Or it can do something else: it can stop dividing, enlarge, change its behavior, and stay. This third option is cellular senescence, and for decades it was understood primarily as a tumor suppression mechanism — a way of permanently halting cells that might otherwise accumulate mutations and turn cancerous. That understanding was correct as far as it went. What took longer to recognize was the cost.
Epigenetic clocks — Horvath, GrimAge, and what biological age tests actually measure
You spit in a tube, seal it, mail it off, and eight weeks later a number arrives: your biological age. Maybe the report says 38.2. You're 44 chronologically. A minor celebration. Or it says 47.6, and you spend the next week wondering what exactly you've been doing to yourself. The number has a quality of authority that a cholesterol panel carries — it arrives formatted, annotated, compared to a reference range, delivered by a company with a clean website and peer-reviewed citations in the footer. The question worth asking before you do anything with it is what the number actually measures, how confident you should be in it, and what the science behind it can and cannot honestly tell you.
Gene expression and tissue specificity — why the same genome makes different cells
In 1962, a British developmental biologist named John Gurdon did something that shouldn't have been possible according to the consensus of the day. He took the nucleus of a fully differentiated intestinal cell from an adult frog, transplanted it into an enucleated frog egg, and watched it develop into a functioning tadpole. The experiment was technically difficult, widely doubted, and conceptually unsettling, because it implied something that the field hadn't fully accepted: differentiated cells don't lose genetic information when they specialize. The intestinal cell's nucleus contained everything needed to build a complete organism. Every cell type, throughout the frog's body, carried the full complement of genetic instructions. They just used different parts of it.
NAD+ and CD38 — why supplementing alone might not be enough
You start taking NMN. Your NAD+ levels come up, at least on a blood test. Three months later, maybe six, the effect seems to blunt. You're still taking it, the dose hasn't changed, but something about the initial lift has flattened. Maybe you increase the dose. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn't. You've entered a conversation that the supplement marketing doesn't prepare you for: that raising NAD+ levels is not just a question of what you put in, but of what's consuming it on the other end — and that consumption is running faster as you age.
NAD+ in cognitive function and neuroprotection
You notice it around mid-morning, maybe an hour or two after waking. The thoughts aren't quite connecting the way they used to. Words that were automatic are now effortful, just slightly — not the dramatic forgetting of a medical event, just a very quiet dimming. You'd dismiss it as tiredness or age if it weren't so consistent, if it weren't there even on the days when you slept well and ate well and did everything right. The cognitive baseline has shifted and the shift happened so gradually that you can't point to when it started. You just know it doesn't feel like before.
What people are reporting about NAD+ infusions
This article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.
NAD+ IV vs subcutaneous vs oral — what bioavailability research suggests
You've read the research, or at least enough of it. You understand that NAD+ declines with age, that sirtuins need it, that mitochondrial energy metabolism depends on it. You've decided the conversation is worth having with your prescribing provider. And then you hit the question that the popular articles tend to gloss over: take it how, exactly? A capsule? A drip? A weekly injection? The delivery route for NAD+ is not a minor implementation detail. For this particular molecule, it might be the most consequential decision in the entire protocol.
NAD+ vs NMN vs NR — the precursor conversation
You're standing in the supplement aisle — or the online equivalent of it, scrolling through a longevity stack that someone recommended on a podcast — and there are three things that look related: NAD+, NMN, and NR. They're all described as "NAD+ support." They're all priced somewhere between expensive and extremely expensive. They're all backed by citations to researchers whose names you half-recognize. And the differences between them are explained, in every product description you've read, in a way that somehow makes it less clear what you should actually be taking, not more.
Proteostasis — the quality-control network that keeps proteins from killing cells
A protein begins life as a featureless string. The ribosome reads the genetic code and links amino acids one by one into a linear chain, and that chain, in itself, does nothing — it is a sentence with no meaning until it folds. Folding is where a protein becomes a machine: the chain collapses, in milliseconds to seconds, into a precise three-dimensional shape, and that shape is the function. An enzyme's pocket that grips its target, an antibody's arms that clamp an antigen, the channel in a membrane protein that lets ions through — all of it is folded geometry. Christian Anfinsen won a Nobel Prize for showing, in the 1960s, that a protein's sequence contains the instructions for its own folded shape. But Anfinsen worked with purified proteins in a test tube. Inside a living cell, folding has to happen in a chaotic, crowded environment, at speed, on tens of thousands of different proteins at once, with new chains pouring off ribosomes every second and old proteins constantly being damaged. The fact that this works at all, reliably, for decades, is one of the quiet miracles of cellular life, and the system that makes it work is called proteostasis.
The senescent cell story — what makes cells 'zombie cells'
You cut your hand and it heals. The skin closes, the inflammation resolves, the scar fades over months. At no point do you consciously manage this — your body runs an intricate repair sequence without your input, and if you're young and healthy, the outcome is essentially complete restoration. What you don't see is the cellular machinery underneath that sequence: cells dividing to replace damaged ones, immune cells clearing debris, signaling molecules coordinating the whole operation with timing measured in hours. And somewhere in that process, certain cells that have served their purpose — that have divided as many times as they safely can, or that have accumulated damage that makes further division risky — enter a state from which they will not emerge. They stop dividing and stay stopped. They are still alive. They will not come back.
Sirtuins — the longevity proteins and what they actually do
In the late 1990s, a yeast cell in Leonard Guarente's lab at MIT quietly upended the assumption that lifespan was a fixed parameter. The gene in question was Sir2 — Silent Information Regulator 2 — and when researchers added extra copies of it to yeast, the cells lived longer. When they deleted it, the cells died sooner. Nobody had expected a single gene to move the lifespan needle in either direction. The question the experiment opened wasn't just "what does Sir2 do" but something more unsettling: if a gene could regulate how long a cell lives, what exactly is the machinery of aging, and how close to the surface is it?
The unfolded protein response — how the cell handles its own folding crises
In the late 1980s, a cell biologist named Mary-Jane Gething and her colleague Joe Sambrook were studying how a viral protein folds inside cells when they noticed something that did not fit. When they forced cells to accumulate a misfolded protein in a compartment called the endoplasmic reticulum, the cells responded by ramping up production of a particular set of helper proteins — as if the cell had detected the folding problem and was calling for reinforcements. The cell, in other words, was monitoring the quality of its own protein folding and reacting when that quality slipped. Over the following decade, laboratories led by researchers including Peter Walter and Kazutoshi Mori would work out the machinery behind that reaction and give it a name: the unfolded protein response. It turned out to be one of the most important quality-control systems a cell possesses, and its failure runs through some of the most feared diseases in medicine.