Could plasma exchange therapy actually help you live longer?

Cars need oil changes to keep their engines running smoothly.

- Mohana Ravindranath

Some anti-ageing influencers, along with a handful of scientists, believe exchanging the plasma in your blood can do a similar thing for humans to help slow biological ageing. The procedure is currently offered for thousands of dollars a session at many longevity clinics.

In a car, “you change the oil every 3,000 miles because it clears out debris,” said Dr Eric Verdin, the president and chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing. Your blood, he said, can also accumulate potentially damaging particles that can be flushed out.

One of the first trials examining plasma exchange for anti-ageing in humans, published last week in the journal Ageing Cell, offers early evidence that it may be able to slow the biological breakdown that comes with age, even in otherwise healthy people. The small study of 42 participants, with an average age of 65, found that those who got plasma exchange therapy over the course of a few months had lower concentrations in their blood of the biological compounds that accumulate with age, compared with a control group. The trial was sponsored by Circulate Health, a plasma exchange startup, and written by, among others, Verdin, a company co-founder and head of the scientific advisory board.

Still, many other scientists who study plasma exchange are skeptical. Its anti-ageing benefits for healthy people have “never been proven” in large clinical trials, said Dr Katayoun Fomani, an associate professor and medical director of the blood bank at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and drawing blood and replacing plasma with added fluids could put patients at risk for unnecessary medical complications without a clear payoff.

How does the procedure work?