Discovering the fountain of youth is an age-old pursuit (no pun intended). One of the latest attempts to reverse the clock that’s generating buzz is a technique called therapeutic plasma exchange, a procedure that filters out and replaces the liquid part of blood. A 2025 study Senescent cell suggests that the technique could reduce biological age by two and a half years.
But before you start Googling “plasma clinics near you,” it’s important to look beyond the headlines to see what the study says and what the new plasma does — and doesn’t — mean as an antiaging elixir.
Why do longevity experts care about plasma?
Plasma is more than the fluid surrounding the red and white blood cells in the bloodstream. Although it is mostly water, it is also rich in proteins, metabolites, hormones and inflammatory signals – molecules that reflect and influence what is happening in the organ systems. Andrea Maier, MD, PhDgeriatrician and board member of the Academy of Health and Lifespan Research, tells SELF.
“It’s a delivery system like DHL, a vehicle that gets things from the brain to the muscles, from the kidneys to the lungs and so on. So it has a lot of information,” he says.
This makes it a smart focal point for longevity studies, as you can get a wide-angle view of your body’s internal state, sometimes called its “biological age.” By measuring changes in the levels of thousands of proteins circulating in your blood plasma, you can get some idea of how well you are working.
This means that you may be 40 years old, but your biology is more like that of a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old. This is not a fixed or exact measurement, but useful health information, Keenan Walker, PhDa senior researcher at the National Institute on Aging tells SELF.
“There is no single biological age, but people try to estimate it,” he says. “And studies have found that people whose biological age is older than their chronological age are at greater risk of chronic disease, illness, and death.”
About 15 years ago, researchers began to explore the connection between plasma and the aging process. This led to experiments using a procedure called parabiosis, a surgical technique that connects the circulatory systems of two different organisms. In the studies, the researchers matched the systems of old and young mice, with the hypothesis that by spreading younger plasma in an older organism, the older organism’s body might benefit.
