Alex Janin | Photographs by Jonah Rosenberg for WSJ

For up to six figures a year, longevity clinics promise to buy their patrons longer, healthier lives. For now, they're conferring something maybe just as valuable: status.

Plenty of people are deciding the hefty fees are worth it. High-end medical clinics aimed at optimizing their clients' health for years to come are proliferating, as demand for their often-experimental treatments grows. A few hundred such clinics now operate in the U.S., longevity doctors and market researchers estimate. Most of them are in affluent areas in California, New York and Florida, according to research and media company Longevity.Technology.

Longevity clinics can charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for à la carte services such as biological age-testing, preventive body scans or plasma exchange and, at the highest end, $100,000 or more for annual memberships. At $250,000 a year, for instance, Extension Health in downtown New York now offers top-paying clients a "Superhuman" package by invitation only.

Robin Leigh, a chef-turned-restaurateur who alternates between London, New York and Miami, used to belong to the private social club Soho House. Now, he says, he would rather do hyperbaric oxygen therapy than mingle with influencers over Martinis. He estimates he spends $120,000 a year on longevity-related care in those cities for treatments such as red-light therapy and stem-cell injections for his knee pain.

"My main priority in life is to look and feel as good as I possibly can, " says Leigh, who takes more than 30 supplements a day and sees a concierge longevity doctor on top of his clinic visits. He says he recently got peptide injections at a London clinic for a price on par with a table for six at the upscale restaurant Cipriani.

"But they will last and make me look so healthy," he says.

Many doctors and scientists caution that some clinics' treatments lack robust scientific evidence and could even carry certain health risks. Supplements, a big part of many longevity regimens, aren't regulated at the level that prescription drugs are, for instance.

"That's the huge struggle in the field," says Mazzarine Dotou, an operations lead at the National University of Singapore's Academy for Healthy Longevity. "We don't know when you're taking a supplement if they really have any effect on you."

Yet the clinics' nontraditional approaches are often the draw for those obsessed with fighting aging and with the means to get personalized medical care, say clients, consultants and clinic operators.

"Being healthy inside and out is actually the ultimate status symbol," says Julia Klim, who advises high-end gym club operator Equinox on longevity efforts. The company launched a $3,000-a-month longevity program last year that includes sleep, nutrition and exercise coaching and tests of metrics such as V02 max, a measure of aerobic capacity.

At Extension Health, services include peptide therapy, medical imaging and experimental procedures such as plasma exchange, which involves removing a patient's blood, separating its components and replacing the plasma with a mixture of saline and albumin.

The clinic's lower-level annual membership costs $10,000 and includes quarterly doctor's visits, preventive body scans and comprehensive blood work.

For those who get the "Superhuman" package, "we are your everything," says founder Dr. Jonathann Kuo. Many of the clinic's clients, he adds, are chief executives, company founders and celebrities.

One Superhuman-tier client, a man in his early 50s, says he invested in the membership in the hopes of adding more healthy years to his life. His regimen at Extension includes plasma exchange and peptide injections. He has also traveled outside the U.S. for experimental stem-cell and gene-therapy treatments, he says.

Corey Malczewski and his wife, Kate, belong to Miora, a clinic that opened in 2023 in Minneapolis. The roughly $6,000 a year that they pay includes blood work and meetings with providers every few months. Both also started taking a compounded GLP-1 -- the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known by names such as Ozempic. His first appointment, which involved drawing 12 vials of blood, was a birthday gift from a friend.

"What do you get a man who's 50 years of age who has everything?" Malczewski said.

As the number of clinics grow, some practitioners are seeking to develop standards for longevity care. The Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, a professional group of longevity specialists, is working to establish evidence-based guidelines and standards for the clinics, as well as training for healthcare professionals. The group consulted with the Abu Dhabi Department of Health, which last year became the first government agency to set regulatory standards for longevity clinics.

The standards include definitions for concepts such as "biological age," a measure of how fast or slow a person is aging physically, and "healthspan," how long a person lives in good health. Physicians are required to have formally trained in healthy longevity medicine or have experience in related fields.

In Minneapolis, Malczewski says his longevity clinic membership is already paying off. He credits the GLP-1 regimen with helping him reverse his prediabetes. After five months of monitoring his blood sugar levels with a continuous glucose monitor, his average blood sugar level dropped and he lost weight.

When he catches up with friends these days, the conversations are less about family and finances than they used to be. Now, they often talk about exercise regimens and testosterone boosters and compare blood pressure readings.

"We kind of cheer each other on," Malczewski says.

Write to Alex Janin at alex.janin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 06, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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