Late-life semaglutide treatment slows ageing and extends lifespan in female mice

Yufan Feng, Marine Barthez, Yifei Wang, Yibing Chen, Huixian Qiu, Chih-Ling Wang, Kartoosh Heydari, Melaine Delcroix, Lene Juel Rasmussen, Vilhelm A. Bohr, Danica Chen

1. 01

   Median lifespan extended ~12% when treatment began at 20 months (approx. 60 human-years equivalent)

2. 02

   Improved exercise endurance, spatial memory, exploratory behaviour and glucose control after 3 months

3. 03

   Enhanced regenerative capacity of haematopoietic and neural stem cells

4. 04

   Transcriptomic attenuation of inflammation and other ageing hallmarks

5. 05

   Effects paralleled and in some domains exceeded matched calorie restriction

Study Design

preclinical

Sample Size

Not reported

Study Duration

3 months functional; lifespan to death

Methodology

Late-life (20-month) semaglutide in female C57BL/6 mice; 3-month functional phenotyping, hallmark-of-ageing assays and transcriptomics; continued dosing for lifespan; longitudinal head-to-head against matched calorie restriction.

Limitations

Mouse study, female C57BL/6 only (no males, single strain, single site). Peer-reviewed but not an ITP multi-site replication. Human relevance of lifespan effect unknown; the only human ageing-biomarker RCT (semaglutide, ~9% slowing of PCGrimAge pace, Nat Commun 2026) was in a specific HIV-lipohypertrophy population. Lean-mass loss in older adults remains the key unresolved clinical risk.