Longevity Medicine: What It Is, What Works, and Switzerland's Role

What longevity medicine is, and what it is not

Longevity medicine is preventive medicine that targets the ageing process itself, with the aim of extending healthspan, the years lived in good health. A 2021 paper in The Lancet Healthy Longevity describes it as personalised preventive medicine powered by deep biomarkers of ageing and longevity, drawing on biogerontology, geroscience and precision, preventive and functional medicine. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Aging calls it an emerging discipline built on early detection, prevention and personalised approaches that aim to extend healthy lifespan.

The Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, founded in August 2022 to build a clinical framework for the field, defines healthy longevity medicine as optimising health and healthspan by targeting ageing processes across the lifespan. In practice that means measuring risk and biological ageing, changing what can be changed, and, at the experimental edge, trying drugs and procedures meant to slow ageing itself.

What it is not, yet, is an established specialty with agreed rules. A 2025 review in Biogerontology found that no longevity intervention has yet been proven effective or ready for widespread clinical adoption, and that the field is held back by the lack of validated interventions, regulatory frameworks and standardised biomarkers. That gap is why this guide separates what is proven from what is promising.

What a longevity clinic does

A longevity clinic is a private clinic that sells this approach as tests and treatments. SWI swissinfo.ch counted just over twenty private clinics offering longevity tests and treatments in Switzerland in May 2025, against an estimated 800 in the United States. Swiss offers range from half-day check-ups in Zurich to residential weeks on Lake Geneva and Lake Lucerne; what each costs is set out in our price guide to longevity clinics in Switzerland.

The treatments most often found at clinics, according to the same survey, include cryotherapy, red light therapy, vitamin infusions and hyperbaric oxygen. It also found clinics adding experimental treatments such as gene therapy or blood plasma exchange, although its author did not come across these in Switzerland.

The last step is the one to insist on. A programme that measures only on arrival cannot show that anything changed, so ask for the date, price and method of the second measurement before you book.

Interventions with strong evidence

The interventions with the strongest evidence for a longer, healthier life are available without a clinic. In a 50-year study of male British doctors, men born between 1900 and 1930 who kept smoking cigarettes died on average about ten years younger than lifelong non-smokers, and stopping at 30 gained about ten years of life expectancy (BMJ, 2004).

The World Health Organization recommends 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle strengthening (British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2020). In the PREDIMED trial of 7,447 people aged 55 to 80 at high cardiovascular risk, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts reduced major cardiovascular events, with hazard ratios of 0.69 and 0.72 against a reduced-fat control diet over a median of 4.8 years; the results were re-analysed after problems with randomisation at some sites (New England Journal of Medicine, 2018).

Sleep matters at both ends: a meta-analysis of 1.38 million participants linked short sleep (relative risk 1.12) and long sleep (1.30) with higher mortality, an association rather than proof of cause (Sleep, 2010). Combined, habits have a large effect. In two US cohorts followed for decades, people with five low-risk habits were projected to have 14.0 more years of life expectancy at 50 if women and 12.2 if men, compared with people with none (Circulation, 2018).

Christoph Handschin, a cell biologist at the Basel Biozentrum, summed up the position for SWI swissinfo.ch: "Where we have good evidence in humans is for things like exercise that might appear pedestrian."

Interventions with weak or missing evidence

The drugs and supplements marketed for longevity have much thinner evidence. A 2025 meta-analysis found that current evidence does not support the NAD+ precursors NMN and NR for preserving muscle mass and function in adults with a mean age over 60 (Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle). In the PEARL trial, 48 weeks of low-dose rapamycin in healthy adults did not change the primary outcome, visceral fat, although the authors report improvements in lean tissue mass and self-reported pain in women taking the higher dose (Aging, 2025).

A first-in-human pilot of senolytics, drugs aimed at senescent cells, was an open-label study of 14 patients with lung fibrosis, published in 2019 (EBioMedicine). A trial with Swiss co-authors shows what a careful result looks like: in 66 adults aged 65 to 90, urolithin A did not significantly improve its primary endpoints over placebo, although muscle endurance improved (JAMA Network Open, 2022).

Stem cell treatments sold for ageing are the clearest warning case. The International Society for Stem Cell Research cautions that many clinics offering stem cell treatments make claims not supported by current science, and advises caution with any treatment offered without regulatory approval or outside a registered clinical trial. Common clinic treatments such as cryotherapy, red light, vitamin infusions and hyperbaric oxygen can improve specific biomarkers, for example in athletes, but most fail to show that the benefit lasts or that people live longer, as SWI swissinfo.ch reported.

Biological age tests and epigenetic clocks

A biological age test tries to measure how old the body behaves rather than how many birthdays it has had. One widely used kind reads DNA methylation, chemical marks on DNA that change with age. Steve Horvath's multi-tissue clock, published in Genome Biology in 2013, was built from 8,000 samples covering 51 tissues and cell types and estimates age from 353 sites in the genome.

Later clocks such as PhenoAge, GrimAge and DunedinPACE do not always agree with each other. In the CALERIE trial, 220 adults without obesity were randomised to 25% calorie restriction or their usual diet for two years; restriction slowed the pace of ageing measured by DunedinPACE but did not significantly change PhenoAge or GrimAge (Nature Aging, 2023).

Two further findings matter for anyone buying a test. Technical noise alone produced deviations of up to nine years between replicate readings on six prominent clocks (Nature Aging, 2022), and there is still no consensus on how biomarkers of ageing should be validated before they are used in clinics (Nature Medicine, 2024). A clock result is a research measurement, not a diagnosis; to track change, repeat the same test with the same provider and read small shifts with caution.

A Swiss analysis shows what a realistic effect looks like. In a post hoc analysis, led by the University of Zurich, of 777 Swiss participants aged 70 and over in the five-country DO-HEALTH trial, omega-3 at 1 g a day slowed three clocks over three years; the treatments' effects ranged from 2.9 to 3.8 months, which the authors describe as small (Nature Aging, 2025).

Cellular therapy: the Swiss beginning in 1931

Paul Niehans, born in Bern in 1882, developed from about 1931 what became known as cellular therapy: injections of mostly freshly obtained cells from sheep foetuses, a method the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes as contested by conventional medicine. Time magazine later described how it began in 1931, when Niehans injected a patient too ill for a gland transplant with cells from the parathyroid glands of a newborn lamb.

Niehans practised mainly at La Prairie in Montreux, and Clinique La Prairie dates its work to 1931. His patients included Pope Pius XII, whom he treated during the Pope's illness in 1954, and on 5 April 1955 the Pontifical Academy of Sciences named him a member, listing his field as cell therapy. Time reported in 1959 that most Swiss physicians viewed him with suspicion.

La Prairie's Revitalisation programmes today include what the clinic calls CLP Extract, which SWI swissinfo.ch described in 2025 as an oral supplement inspired by Niehans' original work. The clinic also offers a stem cell protocol for skin rejuvenation, using the patient's own cells taken from fat tissue, priced separately; what its programmes cost is covered in our price guide.

How Swiss law treats cell injections today

The legal position has moved a long way since Niehans. Under the federal Transplantation Act of 8 October 2004, in force since 1 July 2007 and applying today in the version of 1 February 2021, therapy with living animal cells counts as xenotransplantation, which needs authorisation from the Federal Office of Public Health under strict conditions meant to exclude or minimise the risk of pathogens passing from animals to people, according to joint guidance from the FOPH and Swissmedic (2015).

Preparations made from cell extracts, without living cells, are medicines under the Therapeutic Products Act. According to the same guidance, an amendment on 1 October 2010 ended the option of making them up as magistral preparations, so they need a Swissmedic marketing authorisation, and their manufacture and distribution need a Swissmedic licence. Transplant products, made by processing cells, tissues or organs, fall under both acts; what that means for a patient's own stem cells is covered in our guide to stem cell therapy.

Longevity in Switzerland today: clinics and research

The Swiss clinical sector is small. Beyond La Prairie, programmes with published prices run at Chenot Palace Weggis on Lake Lucerne and at Grand Resort Bad Ragaz, walk-in check-ups at AYUN in Zurich and one-client stays at The Kusnacht Practice on Lake Zurich. In our network, Calda Clinic in Zurich offers an outpatient longevity package and Biotonus, on the lakeshore in Montreux, offers medically supervised programmes including weight management and anti-ageing treatment; the longevity and revitalisation page sets out the options.

The research base is broader. The University of Zurich's Healthy Longevity Center has been fully operational since April 2023 with eight research and innovation groups, and its managing director, the psychologist Christina Röcke, told SWI swissinfo.ch that much of the solid evidence points to advice older generations already gave, which does not need to be bought in an expensive clinic. The university's Department of Geriatrics and Aging Research led the DO-HEALTH analysis above, and Christoph Handschin at the Basel Biozentrum has written on separating fact from fiction in the field.

Industry and academia overlap. Eight of the thirteen authors of the 2024 Frontiers in Aging review cited above list the Zug company Maximon AG or the clinic AYUN as their affiliation, alongside researchers from ETH Zurich's Laboratory of Extracellular Matrix Regeneration and University Hospital Basel. Researchers from Amazentis, a company at the EPFL Innovation Park, co-authored the urolithin A trial above. None of this makes the work wrong, but it is a reason to read who wrote a paper as carefully as what it says.

How to judge a longevity clinic

A good longevity clinic is easier to recognise by its answers than by its facilities. These are the questions worth settling in writing before a deposit is paid.

MedReg is run by the Federal Office of Public Health and shows a doctor's diploma, specialist qualifications and cantonal licence to practise. When the better answer is care at home, we say so; otherwise, write to us with what you want to measure or change, and we can put the current published options in front of you.

Sources

Every source below was read on 22 September 2026. Journal articles are linked through their DOI; where a figure comes from a news report, the text says so.