What DrugAge is for

DrugAge collects published experiments in which a compound was given to a model organism and lifespan was measured. Each entry records the compound, the species and strain, the dose, and the reported change in lifespan, with a link back to the original paper. The point is not to declare winners. The point is to make the evidence countable.

Why a database and not a review

A review is a snapshot of one author's reading. A database can be queried, filtered, corrected, and fed to a model. Once several hundred interventions sit in the same table, questions that are impossible to answer by reading become straightforward: how often are results replicated across strains, how large is a typical effect, which compound classes recur.

A compound appearing in DrugAge means somebody measured a lifespan effect and published it. It does not mean the effect is large, replicated, or relevant to humans.

What the audit found

In the methodological appraisal we published in npj Aging, we went back through the database and looked at how the underlying studies report themselves: whether sample sizes, controls, and statistics are stated clearly enough to be reused, and how the effect sizes are distributed once they are put side by side.

The distribution matters more than any single row. Small, well-controlled effects reported honestly are more useful than headline numbers from a single cohort, and a database makes the difference visible instead of rhetorical.

How to use it

• Treat an entry as a pointer to a paper, not as a conclusion.
• Check the species and strain before generalising anything.
• Prefer compounds with independent replications over larger single-study effects.

That is the whole ambition: make the field's own evidence easy to look at, so that the next experiment is chosen for a better reason than novelty.