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UAE longevity boom: Doctors reveal anti-ageing treatments worth the money
From Bryan Johnson-style biohacking and peptide therapies to GLP-1 drugs, UAE experts separate evidence-backed longevity medicine from expensive hype
- PUBLISHED: Thu 13 Aug 2026, 8:52 AM
US entrepreneur Bryan Johnson spends millions of dollars a year trying to optimise his body and slow the ageing process. But UAE doctors say most people don't need a billionaire's laboratory of supplements, tests and experimental therapies to improve their chances of living longer and healthier.
The strongest evidence for extending healthy years remains remarkably unglamorous: cardiovascular fitness, strength training, adequate sleep, controlling blood pressure and cholesterol, managing blood sugar and not smoking.
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At the same time, a booming longevity market is offering consumers an increasingly sophisticated menu of peptides, intravenous infusions, biological-age tests, supplements and experimental treatments — many of which remain ahead of the evidence.
"Most of what actually works is subtraction and consistency," said Dr Ihsan Almarzooqi, co-founder of Metabolic.
"Sleeping properly, not smoking, moving your body, getting your numbers checked regularly. It's not as compelling, but it's what the evidence supports."
Dr Allison C. Herbert, a staff physician in the Preventive Medicine Department at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, similarly said there was no single treatment, supplement or test that could replace the fundamentals of preventive healthcare.
"Healthy ageing is the result of managing multiple aspects of health consistently over time," she said.
What doctors say is worth the money
For those looking to invest in their long-term health, doctors say the first priority should be identifying and managing individual risk factors rather than chasing the latest longevity protocol.
Herbert said prevention remained at the centre of healthy ageing, including assessing cardiovascular and metabolic risk, monitoring cholesterol and blood sugar, screening for cancer where appropriate and evaluating body composition.
Regular physical activity, including strength and cardiovascular exercise, combined with a balanced diet also has strong evidence behind it, she said.
Ali Hashemi, co-founder of Metabolic, said the strongest evidence currently supports cardiorespiratory fitness, resistance training, maintaining bone density and muscle mass, improving sleep and treating sleep apnoea, avoiding smoking, controlling blood pressure, lowering ApoB cholesterol and maintaining glycaemic control.
"Cardiorespiratory fitness. The association with all-cause mortality is stronger than anything else we measure," he said.
Hashemi also pointed to GLP-1 receptor agonists, saying their significance in the longevity conversation was no longer simply about weight loss.
"GLP-1 receptor agonists belong here now. Not because of weight loss, but because we have cardiovascular outcome data," he said.
He said this represented a different standard of evidence from many of the interventions dominating the longevity market.
The treatments of which doctors are wary
Among the interventions Almarzooqi believes are being overhyped are exosome therapies, some peptides, high-dose NAD+ infusions marketed as ways of reversing cellular ageing and biological-age supplement stacks based on limited observational evidence.
"These sit on evidence levels most patients would never accept if we actually showed them the source," he explained.
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi's Herbert also urged caution around stem-cell treatments offered outside established clinical settings, intravenous vitamin treatments without a documented deficiency, peptide therapies and supplements marketed for "cellular rejuvenation".
"Popularity should not be confused with evidence," she said.
Almarzooqi classified several popular longevity interventions as having insufficient evidence for general use among healthy people.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has established uses such as wound healing and decompression sickness, he said, but there is little evidence to support its use for general longevity in healthy people.
Red-light therapy has shown some early signals for areas such as skin and inflammation, but does not currently support the broader anti-ageing claims attached to it.
NAD+ therapies are, in his view, among the clearest examples of marketing moving faster than the data, particularly at the doses and prices marketed for anti-ageing.
Likewise, routine IV vitamin drips have little justification for a healthy adult without a documented deficiency.
Biological age: useful number or expensive gimmick?
Biological-age testing has become a prominent feature of the longevity industry, with consumers offered tests that claim to reveal whether their bodies are biologically younger or older than their chronological age.
But Almarzooqi said such tests were "marketed beyond the evidence".
Epigenetic clocks, he said, are often built to study populations rather than individual patients, and the margin of error can be too wide for doctors to base individual treatment decisions on a single biological-age number.
"The other issue is what the number gets used to sell something," he said.
Marketing can imply that a person's biological age will drop because of a supplement or infusion, he said, while the interventions that actually influence health outcomes remain the familiar ones: exercise, sleep, nutrition and not smoking.
For healthy adults, Almarzooqi said useful measures include blood pressure, ApoB rather than LDL alone, HbA1c, resting heart rate, waist circumference, sleep-apnoea assessment, body composition and a measure of fitness.
But more testing is not necessarily better.
He said a healthy person without symptoms or a specific family-history concern may not need a full genetic panel, whole-body MRI or large hormone panel simply because these are marketed as part of a longevity package.
"More data isn't automatically more useful. Sometimes it's just more noise," he said.
Peptides: promising science or hype?
Peptides occupy a particularly complicated position in the longevity market because the category includes both established medicines and experimental therapies.
"GLP-1s are the obvious example, and they're peptides, which people forget," Almarzooqi said.
But he cautioned that many peptides promoted specifically for longevity are supported only by animal studies, early human data or other preliminary evidence.
His clinic grades peptides according to the strength of available evidence, from approved clinical trials through to early research and expert opinion.
"The point isn't to be purist about it. It's so a patient knows whether they're getting something with a real trial behind it or something genuinely promising but still early," he said.
The issue is not only whether a compound works.
Almarzooqi warned that consumers obtaining peptides outside tightly controlled medical settings may not know what is actually in the vial.
"Contamination, wrong dosing, or an entirely different substance can end up in something sold with complete confidence," he said.
He said the safest approach was to establish a baseline, introduce an intervention where clinically appropriate and then remeasure outcomes rather than relying solely on how a person feels.
"That loop, baseline, intervention, remeasurement, is the whole difference between a peptide being a legitimate part of someone's care and being a guess with a fancier name," he said.
The younger longevity consumer
The longevity market is also attracting younger adults, with Almarzooqi reporting more patients in their 20s and 30s seeking preventive care.
But he said the motivation was often less about wanting to live to 120 than avoiding the diseases that affected their parents.
"A lot of them have watched a parent get a diagnosis in their fifties that had been building quietly for twenty years, and they'd rather know now than find out the same way," he said.
Herbert said millennials and Gen Z were increasingly interested in understanding their health earlier, before symptoms or disease developed.
The goal, she said, was not simply to live longer but to maintain good health and independence for as long as possible.
The Bryan Johnson problem
Social media has helped push longevity into the mainstream, with highly visible figures such as Johnson showcasing intensive routines involving testing, supplements, diet and other interventions.
But Almarzooqi warned consumers against assuming that an extreme routine designed around a highly resourced individual can simply be replicated by everyone else.
"The extreme, highly resourced routines you see online are not medicine you can extrapolate from," he said.
"What works for someone with a full-time team, unlimited testing, and one single patient to optimise — which is themselves, i.e. Bryan Johnson — doesn't translate cleanly to a protocol for a general population."
Social media, he said, often serves as the first point of curiosity for patients, who may then arrive at a clinic asking about a peptide, supplement, scan or protocol they have encountered online.
"We've noticed that most social media influencers that put out content on this subject have no formal scientific education," he said.
The biggest misconception, he said, was that longevity medicine meant doing more.
"More supplements, more tests, more data, more protocols stacked on top of each other" is not necessarily better.
How much does longevity cost?
The price of longevity-focused care can vary substantially depending on what is included, but Hashemi said a high-end clinic could charge Dh30,000 to Dh60,000 for an annual prediabetes-reversal or weight-management journey.
He said the cost should also be viewed in the context of what is actually being treated.
Much of Metabolic's care, he said, can be covered by insurance because it falls within conventional medical treatment rather than purely preventive wellness services.
"Diagnostics, cardiology, endocrinology, chronic disease management. These are covered, because payers already recognise them as medicine," Hashemi said.
He argued that longevity care is perceived as a luxury product partly because services operating outside insurance have to be sold directly to consumers.
"Anything that has to be sold starts to take on the aesthetics of a luxury good, whatever its actual clinical value," he said.
The myth of a single longevity treatment
For Herbert, the central message is straightforward: healthy ageing is not achieved through one intervention.
Maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness can help reduce the risks of frailty, metabolic disease and loss of independence, while a nutrient-rich diet, adequate sleep, avoiding tobacco and maintaining meaningful social connections all contribute to long-term health.
"The challenge is often not knowing what to do, but having the right support to sustain these habits over time," she said.
Almarzooqi said much of what is marketed under the label of longevity is ultimately conventional preventive medicine with better diagnostics and follow-up.
"We didn't invent blood pressure control or resistance training, we just started calling it something with better branding," he said.
For consumers navigating the rapidly expanding market, his advice is to establish what is actually wrong — or what risks they face — before deciding what needs to be added.
"Get a real baseline, see where you actually stand, and then the additions and subtractions that make sense for you become obvious rather than guessed at," he said.
The most effective longevity strategy, the doctors agree, may therefore be considerably less futuristic than the industry suggests: identify risks early, address them consistently and resist the temptation to confuse a higher price tag or more complicated protocol with better medicine.
