Andrew Steele
speaker
169 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2021
last heard Nov 2024
Andrew Steele’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They live a bit longer, which is a good thing, but they're not just sort of stumbling along in ill health, unable to muster the energy even to die. They're healthier, they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. They're less frail, so they can run further and faster on the little mousy treadmills that they use in these experiments. They're more curious.
So if you put a young mouse in a maze, it's often very exploratory. It wants to look around its new environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious, maybe just a bit lazier, because it's a bit more frail. And by giving mice these senolytic drugs that kill the senescent cells, you restore some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these animals, they just look great.
You know, I was a computational biologist, so I never dealt with mice in the lab. And if you look at a picture of one of these mice that's had these drugs, they've got better fur, they've got thicker, plumper skin. They just look fantastic. And so the point is, you know, you can't diet and exercise and live a good life to a healthy, you know, guaranteed healthy hundred years old.
Whereas by using some of these drugs that could potentially slow down, maybe even reverse the aging process, we can allow ourselves to live longer and healthier than any current lifestyle intervention would allow.
Well, we're going to have to wait for some of the clinical trials to happen. So I'm very excited that these things are going to be here in time for all of us because they're already in human clinical trials. But at the moment, you know, mostly we're looking at results in mice and we've got the first tentative results starting to come out in humans.
So hopefully in the next five or so years, we're going to have some of those answers. Do these drugs work in humans as well as they do in mice? And we can start thinking about taking them.
It actually is, yeah. There's a fascinating study that was done a few years ago where people were asked to rate the photographs of other people to guess how old they thought they were. And what they found was that people who looked older tended to have a greater risk of dying in the near future and a greater risk of contracting certain diseases.
And actually, what this really tells us is that there is a sort of fundamental collection of underlying processes that are responsible not just for your internal aging, but for your external aging as well. And so someone who is wrinklier, someone whose hair is a bit grayer, they probably have older insides.
The same processes are giving them an increased risk of cancer, an increased risk of heart disease. And so actually, although I very much hope we don't initially go after these cosmetic things, they're obviously less important. One researcher I spoke to said, you know, I'd far rather have improved, you know, strength and resilience in my arteries than in my skin.
So, you know, they're not so worried about wrinkly skin, but wrinkly arteries effectively. I actually think we're going to solve quite a few of these cosmetic problems almost by accident because we'll go after the causes of these particular diseases. And then what will happen is those same processes are responsible for the wrinkles, the gray hair, all the external stuff.
And so we might find that those things improve at the same time.
The absolute top of my list, and this isn't gonna come as a surprise to anybody listening, is smoking. It's so, so bad for your health. But what you actually find when you dig into health advice is something that's really, really encouraged me actually to make sure I am doing every single thing I possibly can to be that little bit healthier.
And that's because all these different things that were advised about trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, most of them actually slow down the aging process itself. And I think a really good example of this is exercise.
Because, you know, when you're sweating away, you know, on a run or something, it's really obvious your lungs are going, you can feel your heart beating in your chest, you know, your muscles are obviously doing an awful lot of exercise. You can see how that exercise is benefiting your muscles, it's strengthening them, it's benefiting your cardiovascular system.
But actually, this process seems to slow down the aging process as a whole. So it's not just the heart disease that you're deferring by doing exercise. It also defers quite a lot of kinds of cancer. There's even quite good evidence that can reduce the risk of getting dementia and neurodegeneration.
And you just wouldn't necessarily think that working out on the treadmill or going for a bike ride or lifting weights is going to improve your cognitive health as you get older. But because these processes are also interconnected, it just means that doing exercise All of these bits of health advice can improve your health in so, so many different ways, not just the obvious ones.
So some of the things are surprisingly obvious, you know, making sure you don't eat too much, smoking, exercise, that kind of thing, not drinking too much, getting enough sleep. But actually the other thing that can happen is that by understanding the aging biology, you can uncover some slightly less conventional bits of health advice that are nonetheless really important.
I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. So we've begun to understand that a lot of the aging process is driven by a process called chronic inflammation. So let's unpack what that means. Inflammation is the process by which your immune system goes and fights off various threats.
So it can fight off, you know, an infection or it could rush to the site of an injury to try and start the healing process. And when you're youthful, that process is often acute, i.e. it turns on very rapidly when it's needed and it turns off again once the immune system's done its job.
but as we get older this process can become sort of chronic it can just be turned on a little tiny bit all the time kind of a paranoia in your immune system what's going on if you have poor oral health well you've got bacteria in your mouth they're infecting your gums they might be decaying your teeth and the reason that the dentist has you know such a sort of comparatively primitive set of tools they can yank out teeth they can drill holes in them is because your immune system never quite wins this battle so there's this constant process of inflammation going on in your mouth
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