Dr Brad Stanfield
|
MBChB, FRNZCGP
Family-Medicine Physician, Auckland, NZ Dr Brad Stanfield MBChB, FRNZCGP, is a family-medicine physician practising in Auckland, New Zealand.
Beyond the clinic, he leads a health-education YouTube channel followed by more than 280 000 subscribers that focuses on early preventative care and how to slow down age-related decline. Leveraging this community, he successfully crowdfunded a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial evaluating once-weekly Rapamycin alongside exercise on muscle performance in older adults—one of the first investigator-initiated human studies of mTOR modulation for functional aging. |
|
Slowing Down Age-Related Muscle Decline - A New Zealand Clinical Trial
Can we slow, or even reverse, age-related muscle decline?
A first-in-human, randomised controlled trial carried out right here in Aotearoa sought to find out.
Across every model organism tested—yeast, worms, flies, even mice—a molecule called Rapamycin has one remarkable trick: it switches on cellular repair pathways and reliably extends lifespan, in some cases by more than 20 per cent. Even more compelling, when the dosing is dialled in, aged mice on Rapamycin outperform their untreated peers on grip-strength and treadmill tests.
But animal data can only take us so far.
Our Auckland-based team recruited healthy men and women aged 65-85, paired them with at-home exercycle training, and randomly allocated half to once-weekly oral rapamycin and half to an identical placebo. Over 13 weeks we captured chair-stand speed, six-minute-walk distance, grip strength, metabolic markers, and comprehensive safety labs—building the most granular human dataset yet on Rapamycin’s interaction with exercise.
What did we learn? Does Rapamycin turbo-charge training adaptations, leave them unchanged, or produce an unexpected twist? Join the session to see the first-ever human data, explore where the field is heading, and decide whether this venerable anti-fungal might become tomorrow’s muscle-ageing therapy. The findings may redefine how clinicians tackle muscle ageing and frailty.
A first-in-human, randomised controlled trial carried out right here in Aotearoa sought to find out.
Across every model organism tested—yeast, worms, flies, even mice—a molecule called Rapamycin has one remarkable trick: it switches on cellular repair pathways and reliably extends lifespan, in some cases by more than 20 per cent. Even more compelling, when the dosing is dialled in, aged mice on Rapamycin outperform their untreated peers on grip-strength and treadmill tests.
But animal data can only take us so far.
Our Auckland-based team recruited healthy men and women aged 65-85, paired them with at-home exercycle training, and randomly allocated half to once-weekly oral rapamycin and half to an identical placebo. Over 13 weeks we captured chair-stand speed, six-minute-walk distance, grip strength, metabolic markers, and comprehensive safety labs—building the most granular human dataset yet on Rapamycin’s interaction with exercise.
What did we learn? Does Rapamycin turbo-charge training adaptations, leave them unchanged, or produce an unexpected twist? Join the session to see the first-ever human data, explore where the field is heading, and decide whether this venerable anti-fungal might become tomorrow’s muscle-ageing therapy. The findings may redefine how clinicians tackle muscle ageing and frailty.
