A drug is approved against a disease. In the usual categories of disease, ageing is not listed, and the trials that would show it had been slowed could take decades. This paper asks, in Meridian's form, when ageing itself should count as a target for a trial or a regulator, who decides what counts as evidence that it has been slowed (survival, health-adjusted years, biomarkers, clocks read from DNA methylation), by when, and what would make the decider revisit the decision. It answers from nine public texts and, for background, the abstracts of six further works. The nine are the programme page of a United States federal research programme on healthspan and eight openly licensed articles: an essay on ageing as pathology, a commentary on the goal of the field, an economic model, two papers that build measures of biological age from DNA methylation, a small pilot trial, a comparison of two monkey studies and an analysis of a randomized trial in people. It does not use IATHEON's records, and it gives no medical, clinical, nutritional, lifestyle, regulatory or investment advice; it reports findings as their authors state them, with their limits.
The texts agree more about the target than about the evidence. Several argue that ageing is a fit target, for reasons of biology, of medicine or of money; they part over whether the proof should be survival in mammals, health-adjusted years in people, or a molecular reading that changes within a trial. Only the federal text names the regulator and sets a period. The conditions for looking again are written as the steps by which a marker becomes a surrogate endpoint, as follow-up beyond a trial's end, as replication, and as the design choices that split two studies of one question. The contribution is to set these answers side by side and to show which of them each text leaves open.