Dr. Abud Bakri

It's a gland that both secretes hormones and develops the T cells.

So your lymphatic cells are found in your bone marrow.

That's where they're made.

the T cells will travel up to the thymus and get trained so they don't kill you and they don't attack your own tissue, but attack a foreign invader or a cancer or whatever it may be.

That process is very good in youth.

And as you age, you get more autoimmunity, more cancers, et cetera, et cetera, because the immune system is not as robust, both because the thymus makes less of the hormones that train the immune cells and makes less of these immune cells themselves.

So when you're, you know, 15, you're making, uh,

10 to the eighth magnitude of these cells every single day.

They're called naive T cells.

They will eventually become your CD4 and CD8 T cells.

As you age, this number dramatically decreases.

And those cells will live somewhere between 10 and 15 years.

And that can kind of

gauge when the mortality window kicks in for a lot of these different disorders.

When your thymus reaches a minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, heart disease, autoimmunity.

If you put almost any disease and look at the thymus risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus function

There's a Nature paper, 2026, just came out that looked at cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality and all these different metrics that they did MRIs of people.

And the people that had the higher thymic scores had less mortality across every single one of these conditions.

But you said...

It's just a few cells and yet it's somehow maintaining function.