[reasonattlm]

This is not all that important, save as a commentary on the fact that combinational treatments are not well explored in the research community. This is true throughout medicine, and not localized to aging research.

Why not all that important?

1) The current record for nematode life extension - without extending the dauer stage indefinitely, an approach that has no analogue in higher species - is a tenfold extension of life.

2) Stress response upregulation of the sort accomplished here has outcomes that diminish as species life span increases. Where we can compare directly, calorie restriction and growth hormone knockout, the result in humans is constrained to be no more than a few years of additional life. Anything larger would already have shown up in the data.

So why is it that the research and development community don't undertake combinatorial treatments to any significant degree? I blame regulation and intellectual property law. Those items combine to make it much harder to find and deploy potentially synergistic therapies than to just go and work on some new single therapy. Thus there is much more work on new single therapies than one finding combinations of existing therapies that might do much better than either on its own.

[JamesBarney]

With regards to number 1, I think it's interesting to differentiate between genetic, and drug induced changes to lifespan. If only for the reason it's too late to genetically engineer me :).