Field notes, signals and short summaries from the research network in formation.
A 26-week trial at Western University in Canada is testing creatine supplementation and resistance training, separately and together, in adults over sixty with mild cognitive impairment. Recruitment is open, with 200 participants planned and primary completion expected at the end of 2027.
A six-week randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial at Barry University tested magnesium L-threonate in 81 healthy adults aged eighteen to forty-five. It finished in March 2026 and the results have not yet been published.
A randomised, triple-masked, placebo-controlled trial at the University of Oxford gave semaglutide or saline placebo to 70 healthy volunteers aged twenty-one to fifty-five over six to seven days. It completed in December 2024 and results have not been published.
A randomised, triple-masked trial at the Medical College of Wisconsin is testing high-definition transcranial alternating current stimulation against sham stimulation for the recovery of phonological short-term memory in people with aphasia after stroke. It is recruiting, with 120 participants planned, and runs to 2033.
A pilot study at Texas Tech is giving adults with ADHD or autism spectrum disorder a capsule containing 200 mg of L-theanine and 200 mg of paraxanthine, then measuring inhibitory control while they lie in an MRI scanner.
A pilot trial in Seoul is giving Cerebrolysin — a peptide preparation derived from pig brain — or saline to twelve patients who have been in a vegetative or minimally conscious state for more than four weeks after a haemorrhagic stroke.
A trial recruiting at the Complutense University of Madrid is giving 100 people with mild cognitive impairment a probiotic capsule or a placebo for sixteen weeks, and measuring the result with an electrophysiological study rather than a bedside questionnaire.
Most compounds in this section fail somewhere between the bottle and the bloodstream, which gives their defenders a permanent escape route: perhaps it never reached the target. NAD+ precursors do not have that problem.
Part One established that NAD+ precursors reach their target. The obvious next question is what happens then, and the honest way to answer it is to look at the tissue where the question has been asked most often and most carefully.
Part Two ended in a null. This part covers the study that explains why the field kept going anyway, and it is a good piece of work.
The strongest remaining claim for NAD+ in the ageing brain is not about energy. It is about time.
Two trials of nicotinamide riboside are recruiting in the United States. Both concern the ageing brain, both were registered in advance, and both will eventually be described in consumer material with the same four words: a clinical trial showed.
In June 2023, Science published a paper proposing that taurine deficiency is not a consequence of ageing but one of its drivers. It is the reason taurine moved from the energy-drink aisle to the longevity aisle, and it deserves to be read on its own terms before anyone reads the objections.
Part One set out the hypothesis: taurine falls by more than 80 per cent across the human lifespan, and restoring it slows ageing in animals. The first claim is the load-bearing one, because it is the only part of the argument that concerns humans directly.
Part One reported an 80 per cent lifetime decline in taurine. Part Two reported no association with age at all. The usual way to settle such a disagreement is to decide which team was careless.
While the argument described in Parts One to Three was running, a trial in Munich was quietly testing the original version of the claim. It gave 4 grams of taurine a day to adults aged 55 to 75 for six months and measured their biological age two ways.
Spermidine is sold on autophagy — the cellular recycling process it reliably induces. The most rigorous test of whether that translates into anything a person would notice was published in JAMA Network Open in 2022, and it found nothing.
Part One covered the largest randomised trial of spermidine and cognition, which found nothing. The wider literature does not agree with it, or with itself.
Autophagy is described in consumer material as though it were self-evidently good — cellular housekeeping, clearing damaged proteins, renewal. Inducing it is the entire rationale for spermidine.
Three parts of negative and ambiguous evidence would ordinarily close a topic. Instead, the group that produced the largest null result has come back with a different question, a higher dose and better instruments.