tl;dr: The link between TA-65 and anti-aging is not substantiated by any evidence that meets accepted scientific standards.
An answer to this question was posted to this question by (now deleted) user TA-65, which answer purportedly affirmed the existence of a link between TA-65 and anti-aging.
I reproduce the answer, properly down-voted into oblivion, as I believe it contributes to the conclusion about the merits of the claims made (although not for the substance of the answer that user TA-65 provided):
YES ! And that proves scientific studies. In fact, the TA-65 is the only product of its kind to have scientific studies on human cells.
You can find more about that here: TA-65 Supplement – Review and Scientific Research
Also read more about: TA-65
The circumstances of the answer suggest that it was made by a shill promulgating quackery. The user TA-65 seems to have registered solely for the purpose of answering this question. Both of the above links are to ta65doctor.com, a web-site that seems to exist only to sell supplements labelled TA-65.
Looking beyond the motivations of user TA-65, the ta65doctor.com website has a list of research, that references:
Since they sell it, one would reasonably expect ta65doctor.com to put forward the best evidence in support of the association between TA-65 and anti-aging. Below is a synopsis of the conclusions of these papers. It is reasonable based on the analysis below to conclude that the papers cited fail to adequately demonstrate proof of the the claims put forward by the TA-65 website. Combined with the vacuous answer by the shill, it feels correct to conclude that at this time the link between TA-65 and anti-aging is as-yet unsubstantiated by accepted scientific standards.
EDIT : The only one evaluating TA-65 specifically is the last one of that whole list above (alternately titled A Natural Product Telomerase Activator As Part of a Health Maintenance Program). Most of the articles are reviews of Telomerase functions (useless), studies done on mice (useless for humans), and one of the human trials only had 28 participants so its ability to discern information is limited.
From the last study, here are a few excerpts to take note of:
Calvin Harley is one of the inventors of TA-65. He consults for TA Sciences and is personally taking TA-65 and is one of the subjects studied to generate data for this article. He owns stock and stock options in Geron Corporation, a company that is developing telomerase activators for therapeutic purposes and the company that licensed TA-65 to TA Sciences. He is co-founder, President, and CEO, and holds stock in Telome Health, Inc., a diagnostics company that will provide telomere- and telomerase-related assay services to the healthcare industry.
The author of the study for TA-65 has significant financial ties to the company producing TA-65. He's also participating in his own study, which practically ruins any chance the study had at producing clean data.
While that tidbit alone isn't enough to write-off TA-65 completely, it should make anyone considering TA-65 extremely skeptical.
The number of subjects at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months for most tests was 43, 59, 27, and 37, respectively. The age and gender frequencies of the subset at each time point were similar to those of the total baseline population (n = 114; 63 ± 12 years, 72% male).
The total number of participants was 114, but testing was incredibly inconsistent - with a low of 27 and a high of 59 (but never more than about half). That the authors didn't bother to strictly control who reported for tests and only keep those who were consistent about doing so (which is what you normally see for clinical trials - participant attrition over time until you have a single pool of subjects who completed all the exams/treatments), the results drawn from these numbers should be very suspect. I'd venture to call the results useless, but others might provide suggestions as to why they're not.
Starting doses of 5–10 mg/day were considered safe on the basis of historical usage of extracts. Some subjects increased their dosage after several months on the product to 25–50 mg/day.
Then there's that...
Data from this study were collected primarily as a hypothesis-generating exercise because subjects were not participating in a controlled prospective study, and statistical analyses were not formally defined a priori.
... and this, which isn't a huge surprise...
The most striking in vivo effects were declines in the percent senescent cytotoxic (CD8+/CD28−) T cells (1.5, 4.4, 8.6, and 7.5% at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, respectively; p = not significant [N.S.], 0.018, 0.0024, 0.0062) and natural killer cells at 6 and 12 months (p = 0.028 and 0.00013, respectively). Most of these decreases were seen in cytomegalovirus (CMV) seropositive subjects. In a subset of subjects, the distribution of telomere lengths in leukocytes at baseline and 12 months was measured. Although mean telomere length did not increase, there was a significant reduction in the percent short (<4 kbp) telomeres (p = 0.037).
And finally the meat of the whole thing. The results of the study show only that T-Cells who had short Telomeres benefited significantly, and that if you've never contracted CMV - your T-Cells might not benefit at all.
So, if you want to believe the methods for performing the study are still valid, what you can conclude from the study is that the best affect you'll receive from TA-65 supported by evidence is that your Immune System will work slightly better.
