About Long on Meds
Medication-pathway evidence for physician-guided care.
Long on Meds is an educational framework for understanding how established medications may influence inflammatory pathways involved in inflammaging, sarcopenia, and loss of healthspan.
About the project
Long on Meds was developed by Mark Gostine, MD, a chronic pain management specialist who spent his medical career treating patients with pain, inflammation, and loss of function.
Over a four-decade career in medicine, Mark Gostine, MD treated tens of thousands of patients. Many patients who remained with him for decades aged along with him. Long on Meds grew out of observing those patients, his own medical ailments, and how aging, injury, recovery, and healthspan are connected.
The Long on Meds premise
There are no proven human longevity drugs, but there are disease-modifying medications that reduce premature death from real conditions such as vascular disease, obesity, and chronic inflammation. Many of those same conditions feed inflammaging: aging driven by chronic inflammation.
Inflammaging is directly linked to sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and strength with age. Sarcopenia matters because muscle is what allows older people to keep moving, and movement is one of the strongest protectors of vascular health.
Long on Meds examines the repurposing of established generic medications to counter the effects of inflammaging and sarcopenia by reducing disease pressure and inflammatory pressure in ways that may help preserve healthspan.
How medications were reviewed
The Long on Meds database was built by reviewing a broad range of common generic medications for published evidence that they affect inflammation, aging biology, and disease-related inflammatory pathways.
From that wider review, Long on Meds focuses on widely used generic medications with evidence of activity in one or more of three major inflammatory pathways: Cytokine Signaling / NF-κB, NLRP3 Inflammasome, and Oxidative Stress / ROS.
What the shield ratings mean
Green shield: Meaningful published evidence of activity in that pathway.
Yellow shield: Possible or moderate published evidence of activity in that pathway.
Red shield: No meaningful published evidence of activity in that pathway.
Gray shield: The medication was not found in the Long on Meds database, so no pathway rating is available.
A green shield does not mean a medication is right for every person. A red shield does not mean the medication is ineffective for its usual medical purpose. It only means that this medication does not appear to have meaningful evidence for that specific Long on Meds pathway.
Medical use
Long on Meds helps readers see how established generic medications may influence inflammatory pathways involved in inflammaging, sarcopenia, and loss of healthspan.
One purpose of the site is to identify possible opportunities within ordinary medical care. In some medication classes, one generic drug may treat the same condition as another while also showing stronger evidence for reducing inflammatory pressure. That kind of information may help a patient and physician discuss whether a current treatment could be refined without changing the basic medical goal.
Medication decisions should be made with a personal physician who knows the patient’s medical history, diagnoses, kidney function, liver function, allergies, drug interactions, and treatment goals.