UAE doctors say the anti-ageing treatments most worth paying for are not the expensive infusions or biological-age tests dominating the longevity market, but the unglamorous fundamentals: cardiovascular fitness, strength training, sleep, blood pressure control and not smoking.
The warning comes as clinics across the country report growing demand for a widening menu of peptides, intravenous infusions, stem-cell therapies and epigenetic testing, many of which, doctors say, remain well ahead of supporting evidence.
What the evidence actually supports
‘Most of what actually works is subtraction and consistency,’ said Dr Ihsan Almarzooqi, co-founder of Metabolic, the Dubai-based hybrid care clinic he founded in 2019 alongside Ali Hashemi. ‘Sleeping properly, not smoking, moving your body, getting your numbers checked regularly. It’s not as compelling, but it’s what the evidence supports.’
Ali Hashemi, Metabolic’s other co-founder, listed the interventions with the strongest current backing: cardiorespiratory fitness, resistance training, maintaining bone density and muscle mass, 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,’ Hashemi said.
He also pointed to GLP-1 receptor agonists, a class of drugs that includes some weight-loss medicines, as earning a place in the longevity conversation not because of weight loss but because of cardiovascular outcome data. ‘GLP-1 receptor agonists belong here now. Not because of weight loss, but because we have cardiovascular outcome data,’ he said, describing this as a different standard of evidence from many interventions dominating the longevity market.
Dr Allison C. Herbert, a staff physician in the Preventive Medicine Department at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, said no single treatment or supplement could replace the fundamentals of preventive healthcare. ‘Healthy ageing is the result of managing multiple aspects of health consistently over time,’ she said.
Anti-ageing treatments UAE doctors caution against
Almarzooqi said several popular longevity interventions lack sufficient evidence for general use in healthy people. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has established clinical uses in wound healing and decompression sickness, but little backing for general longevity. Red-light therapy has shown early signals in skin and inflammation research without supporting the broader anti-ageing claims attached to it. High-dose NAD+ infusions, he said, are among the clearest examples of marketing moving faster than the data.
‘These sit on evidence levels most patients would never accept if we actually showed them the source,’ Almarzooqi said of these therapies.
Herbert urged caution around stem-cell treatments offered outside established clinical settings. In the UAE, stem-cell and regenerative medicine therapies can only be provided by licensed healthcare facilities meeting standards that include Good Laboratory Practice and Good Clinical Practice, with strict rules governing how such treatments may be advertised.
Biological-age tests have become prominent in the longevity industry, with consumers offered tests claiming to reveal whether their bodies are biologically younger or older than their chronological age. Almarzooqi said such tests were ‘marketed beyond the evidence’. Epigenetic clocks, he explained, are built to study populations rather than individuals, and margins of error can be too wide for treatment decisions. ‘The other issue is what the number gets used to sell something,’ he said.
What a longevity programme costs in the UAE
For consumers seeking professional guidance, the price range is wide. Hashemi said a high-end clinic could charge Dh30,000 to Dh60,000 for an annual prediabetes-reversal or weight-management programme. Much of Metabolic’s care, he said, falls within conventional medical treatment and can be covered by insurance, including diagnostics, cardiology, endocrinology and chronic disease management.
‘Anything that has to be sold starts to take on the aesthetics of a luxury good, whatever its actual clinical value,’ he said, arguing that longevity care is perceived as a luxury partly because services operating outside insurance must be sold directly to consumers.
The longevity market is attracting younger patients. Almarzooqi said he was seeing more people in their 20s and 30s seeking preventive care, motivated less by wanting to live to 120 than by watching a parent receive a serious diagnosis in their fifties. ‘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.
Social media has driven much of this interest, with figures such as US entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, reported to spend around $2 million a year on a protocol involving more than 30 doctors and more than 100 daily supplements, showcasing intensive routines. Almarzooqi warned against drawing direct conclusions from such cases. ‘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,’ he said. A breakdown of Johnson’s reported spending is outlined by Lola Health.
For peptides, Almarzooqi said the category covers both established medicines and early experimental therapies and that consumers obtaining peptides outside controlled medical settings risk contamination, wrong dosing or receiving an entirely different substance. His clinic grades peptides by evidence strength, from approved clinical trials through to early research. ‘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.
His baseline advice: establish what is actually wrong or what risks a person faces before deciding what to add. ‘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 regulation of stem-cell advertising in the UAE is summarised by Parents Guide Cord Blood. Herbert’s message is the same: maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness, a nutrient-rich diet, adequate sleep, avoiding tobacco and keeping 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.
