Dr. Ben Bikman

And even all of that could simply be an outcome of improving metabolic health because back to the origins or the beginning of our conversation, because metabolic health is so foundational to chronic disease, all of this could just be a consequence of improving metabolic health.

But it still is worth the pursuit of determining, well, maybe it is a direct effect.

Maybe there is the direct effect of the drug at the neuron or at the muscle cell, etc.

As far as I'm aware, that's not been elucidated yet.

There is catabolism of the muscle and they're far less resilient and far more fragile.

So we challenge the muscle with a chemical challenge and they die way more readily.

At doses used now at the level in which you see the drug in the plasma.

So it's a physiological dose.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I appreciate the way you framed that, which is you mentioned a word that for a basic scientist is a dreaded word, correlation.

I don't look favorably on correlation because I'm a basic scientist.

I want to do one thing and observe a direct effect from that one thing.

So one reason I am extremely cautious and even a little chagrined with the entire realm of longevity is that it's not to disparage it necessarily, but it's entirely based on correlation when it comes to humans.

We can only speculate and predict and model these sorts of things.

Now, I'm not saying there's no utility to that.

But I also think it behooves us to be mindful of the limitation that comes with that.

So with GLP-1, in fact, it's worth noting another paper was just published this week finding that the risk of blindness –

doubles, more than doubles in people on high dose GLP-1s.