Dr. David Agus
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. David Agus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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What we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. Pretty powerful observation.
You know, very simply is that our goal today, every single person on this planet wants to live better, longer, healthier. The way we could take shortcuts is learning from other species. We've all been on the earth a million years, us and the other species. There are things they've adapted to in ways they've done it to hack their own system that we can learn from and benefit to ours.
So I'm walking with my family on a safari in Africa, coolest trip ever. And an elephant walks by and I say to the guide, hey, they must get lots of cancer. They're 40 to 50 times bigger than us, 40 to 50 times more cells. They're in the sun all day. And he looks at me and say, elephants don't get cancer. And when you look, elephants have 20 copies of a gene called P53, the guardian of the genome.
We have one copy. And what that gene does is it corrects error in DNA from inflammation. So here's a remarkable clue for us. First of all, we can recapitulate that. We can prevent all cancer. But in the short run, we have to take ways to downregulate inflammation. Elephants never get cancer? Elephants rarely get cancer.
So you would think that with so many cells and so many divisions, they have much more cancer than us and they don't. And it's really interesting. Part of the reason is, is that, you know, we have children in their 20s and 30s. And then actually evolution said, I don't care about you because I care about who has good kids. In fact, if you die of cancer, heart disease, etc.,
It brings more food and housing to the next generation. Well, elephant females give birth until their sixth decade. Dominant males protect the herd until the day they die. And so they couldn't afford to get cancer. And we can't, right? Cancer rarely happens in kids, but it happens as we enter our later years. And here's a way that we could potentially prevent it.
Well, first is you do all the research about P53 and that's ongoing. But today we say, hey, listen, what it's doing is correcting errors in DNA that came about from inflammation. So how can we downregulate inflammation in our lives today? Well, there's a simple way, the class of drugs called statins. That's the Lipitor, the cresters of the world.
While they do lower cholesterol, the real mechanism is downmodulating inflammation. And if you look at the studies, it actually reduces cancer. And then you look for sources of inflammation in your life and you want to avoid them. And so it sounds simple. It's actually more complex, but it's doable today. You know, take another crazy example. Do you have a dog? Yeah, I do.
Your dog sleeps all day. And the reason is your dog doesn't get deep sleep. If it got deep sleep, you could walk right by it and do something to the herd or whatever they were bred to protect. Your first night in a hotel, you sleep like a dog because you don't recognize the surroundings.
And you go, oh, my gosh, your body says, hey, I don't want to have deep sleep because I don't recognize the surroundings. And it's dangerous. Something could happen to me. So when I travel, I bring my pillowcase from home. So I have my sensory, my smell and my feel from home. I use my iPhone as my clock from home. So I have a visual cue also, and I get more deep sleep.
So I've kind of learned from the dog how to do the opposite in a sense when I travel, because I don't want to sleep like a dog when I go to a hotel.
Well, there was an amazing study in Europe, in the UK, where they actually took a talent and they took everybody and they divided them in half. They did no blood draws and they put them on a baby aspirin and a statin, two ways to downregulate inflammation.
And what they showed is the people on placebo who got a pill, they didn't know what it was, lived shorter than the people on the statin and the aspirin who lived much longer. So all of a sudden there's real data there. You know, we're in health. If I tell you to go on a pill where you're not going to feel differently and it's going to help you in 10 or 20 years, you roll your eyes at me.
We don't have a near-term readout. And so it's been very difficult to get compliance and to get people to do them. There's a new generation of statin equivalents, drugs that lower inflammation and cholesterol that came out that literally are a shot once a year. It's a technology called siRNA. They're FDA approved, and they could downregulate the pathways to lower cholesterol a year at a time.
Obviously, dramatically helps with the compliance, but that's been part of the problem.
Well, listen, aspirin's 2000 years old. In three large randomized studies with over 100,000 people, what it did was reduce the overall death rate, not the incidence, the death rate of cancer by 30%, heart disease by 22%, and stroke by 17%.
and obviously there was a benefit there there's been newer data out showing that if you take aspirin for four years starting at a later age that there was no benefit in increased fleets and there's no question there's increased please but you need to take it
for six years to see the benefit on cancer and people who don't start aspirin to really late there's normally a reason for that and so if you look at the ground data it's very powerful not everybody should be on it but it's discussion to have with your doctor hey listen if you have a family history of pancreatic cancer or colon cancer you get about a 50 reduction in those cancers by taking a baby aspirin every day but you got to take it earlier in life you can't wait till you're 80.
Yeah, you got to start earlier, and that's where the real benefit is, and the risk of bleeding is much slower. Listen, an 89-year-old, they fall a lot, so risk of bleeding is high. A 40-, 50-, 60-year-old don't, and it's different. That being said, if aspirin is 2,000 years old, why don't we have a Gen 2.0 of aspirin that has the anti-inflammatory parts but doesn't have the bleeding parts?
Unfortunately, there's no patent on aspirin, so there's been no pharma working on this. I wish they would.
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