Therapies
Longevity drugs and therapies compared on outcome trials — GLP-1 agonists, metformin, rapamycin and the rest.
Topic overview →Retatrutide side effects: every number from the trials, by dose
Retatrutide's side effects are mostly in the stomach and rise with the dose. In the phase 3 TRIUMPH-1 trial (2,339 adults, 80 weeks), nausea affected 42.4% on the top 12 mg dose against 14.8% on placebo, diarrhoea 32.0%, constipation 26.1% and vomiting 25.3%, and about 11% stopped the drug because of side effects. The new signal is dysesthesia, a burning or tingling feeling in the skin: about 13% on 12 mg, and 21% in the knee-arthritis trial, against under 0.5% on Zepbound's label. Nothing is known beyond two years, and the trial that will answer the heart question is not due until 2029.
PharmD-reviewed · Updated
Mounjaro vs Ozempic: which works better, and what it costs you
For weight loss, tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) outperforms semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) across every direct comparison published so far — in the head-to-head SURMOUNT-5 trial, 20.2% of body weight against 13.7% over 72 weeks — but that trial was paid for by tirzepatide's maker, and the difference matters less than whether you can tolerate the drug, afford it long term, and stay on it.
PharmD-reviewed · Updated
Weight-loss peptides compared: semaglutide, tirzepatide, retatrutide and CagriSema ranked by evidence
By weight-loss magnitude in published trials, the order is retatrutide (28.3% at 80 weeks in TRIUMPH-1, and up to 30.3% at 104 weeks in participants who started with a BMI of 35 or more) ahead of tirzepatide (~20–22%, the strongest approved option), with CagriSema (~20.4% in REDEFINE-1) and high-dose semaglutide (Wegovy HD 7.2 mg, ~19–21% in STEP UP) close behind, then standard-dose semaglutide (~15% at 2.4 mg) and liraglutide (~5–8%). But magnitude isn't the whole answer: retatrutide and CagriSema are not FDA-approved — retatrutide's maker, Eli Lilly, is not expected to file until Q1 2027, with approval unlikely before late 2027 or 2028, and Novo Nordisk's CagriSema NDA was only submitted in December 2025. Today, tirzepatide is the strongest drug you can actually be prescribed.
PharmD-reviewed · Updated
Eloralintide: what the first trial shows about Lilly's weekly amylin shot
Eloralintide is an experimental once-weekly injection from Eli Lilly that copies amylin, a hormone that signals fullness. It is not a GLP-1 drug and it is not approved in any country. In its 48-week phase 2 trial in 263 adults, people who stayed on the 9 mg dose lost about 20% of their body weight, against 0.4% on placebo. Nausea and fatigue were the most common side effects. Five phase 3 trials are recruiting, and none is due to finish collecting its main data before 2028.
PharmD-reviewed · Updated
Harvard's 'reverse aging' research: what the epigenetic reprogramming studies actually show
David Sinclair's Harvard lab has spent five years building a case that aging is, at its core, a loss of epigenetic information — not irreversible damage — and that restoring it can reverse aging markers. Two mouse studies back this up directly: one restored vision in mice with glaucoma and optic nerve injury, another showed that induced epigenetic 'noise' causally accelerates aging and that reprogramming reverses it. In January 2026, the FDA cleared the first human trial of this approach — a company Sinclair co-founded, Life Biosciences, is now testing a partial-reprogramming gene therapy (ER-100) in patients with glaucoma and NAION, two causes of vision loss. That trial is a safety-focused Phase 1 study, not proof the therapy works in humans — this is genuinely new territory, not an available treatment.
PharmD-reviewed · Updated
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