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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Appearances
And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia.
So again, it just seems like the whole body is this incredibly interconnected thing and keeping one part of it healthy can have huge effects on the whole aging process of every single part of it.
And actually, the genetic contribution to longevity is surprisingly small for people who live a normal length of time. So if your parents lived to 70 or 80, you really shouldn't see that as a ceiling on your own lifespan. We think that genetics only contributes maybe somewhere between 5 and 20% of how long you can go on to live.
But the one exception to this is the people who do live in exceptionally long time. So people who make it into their hundreds, centenarians. There seems to be a huge genetic component to this. In fact, if your parents are centenarians, or if you have a centenarian parent, or if you have a sibling who makes it into their hundreds, you've got a 10 times greater chance of doing so yourself.
And it really seems that the way in which these centenarians make it to these advanced ages is they've just got protection from age-related disease. They really do just age slower than the rest of us. So if you look at studies of centenarians, they don't tend to be much healthier than the general population. They're still a little bit overweight. They often smoke.
They often drink just as much as regular people do. But the fact is that they've got the genetics that keeps them...
It's a really fascinating subject. And so the record for longevity is 122 years held by a French woman called Jeanne Calment. And she set that record in 1997, I think, which is really quite incredible. I think the fact is that people who make it to these exceptionally old ages, they're just so rare that it's very, very hard for that record to be pushed back and back.
But also, I think you are right that, you know, with the current state of You know, no matter how well you live, no matter what medical care you have access to, it's very, very unlikely with the current state of medicine that you're going to be able to live longer than that. The only way that you can stop your body falling apart on that schedule is to intervene in the aging process itself.
Because as I sort of alluded to earlier, you know, say you're 110 and you get cancer and we cure that cancer, there are still loads of other things wrong with your body that are going to probably take you out in the next few years.
Whereas if we could actually slow down aging, that would mean you could make it to 110 in a much healthier state, and that would completely change the game in terms of the limit on human longevity.
I mean, I think the best counter to that is just to look at these negligibly senescent animals. I already mentioned tortoises have this property, but it's not just tortoises. There are actually loads of animals out there. So there are various kinds of fish are negligibly senescent. There's a salamander. There's a tiny little water creature called a hydra.
There's a bit closer to us on the evolutionary tree, something called a naked mole rat, which is a rodent, a bit like a rat or a mouse. But whereas mice live, you know, maybe two or three years in the lab, naked mole rats live to 30. They seem to be almost immune to cancer. They're almost immune to neurodegeneration.
But most importantly, their risk of death is basically constant throughout their adult lives. And then, you know, they suddenly basically fall off a cliff when they get ill toward the very end of their lives. And so, you know, this isn't a biological impossibility. The fact is that we aren't cars. We've got these incredible self-repairing capacities inside ourselves.
And if we can just learn how to augment those with medicine, there's no reason why we couldn't keep ourselves going healthier for longer.
I think there is like a frustrating degree of randomness to this because the fact is that you know in order to get cancer you have to get something like an average of 10 mutations and those mutations have to be in one particular cell.
So say you've got nine mutations in one of your cells right now then you know it could just basically be luck whether you get that tenth one and whether that becomes a cancer and then whether that cancer is spotted by your immune system is partly down to luck.
and whether that cancer then goes on to accumulate further mutations that allow it to spread throughout the body and cause serious disease that might go on to kill you. Again, all of these things are, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle, but at the end of the day, some people do die of cancer in their 30s.
The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, you know, it's... like we were discussing earlier, the odds of death for someone in their 30s are about one in a thousand a year, which is incredibly low. So if we can just get a little bit closer to that, then people could live much longer, healthier lives.
And the reason that I'm particularly excited about trying to follow all this lifestyle advice now is because it means that if I can live a little bit longer, that gives scientists longer to perfect some of these treatments. And then by living longer with those treatments, that gives scientists longer still.
So, you know, say, for example, I can keep myself good and healthy, you know, into my 60s, 70s, 80s. I'll be healthy enough to benefit from that first generation of senolytic drugs that can remove those aged cells and increase my lifespan. I'll be able to benefit from other new treatments that are developed over the next few decades.
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