Dr. Eric Topol

So a diet that's healthy is one thing.

The second is exercise is incredibly important for keeping our immune system intact.

and blocking untoward inflammation.

And then sleep, really important, deep sleep.

It's good.

Wow, that's great.

If you get deep sleep, you know, this is the ticket for getting those waste products out of your brain each night.

And as we get older, we tend to get much less deep sleep, that slow-wave sleep, usually in the beginning of the night.

So getting that, and you can work on that, but it's much more than just these lifestyle factors.

We've now learned that the immune system degradation with age, so-called immunosenescence, and inflammation, our propensity for that as we get older, inflammation,

These are the drivers of age-related diseases, and we can suppress them.

Like, for example, we talked about what can you do about Alzheimer's.

There have been three huge studies of the shingles vaccine, so-called natural experiments, in three different countries around the world.

Australia, Wales, and the U.S.

And what we saw from that was the shingles vaccine not only protects against getting shingles, which is bad enough, but it brought down dementia and Alzheimer's by 25%.

If that was a drug, that'd be extraordinary.

These data certainly convinced me of, you know, getting the shingles vaccines, which is... Well, I hope you were going to get it anyway, Dr. Tobin.

Yeah, you know, I was, but it really took it over the, you know...

I get sick whenever I get these shots, you know, whether it's a COVID booster.

And I've had colleagues that got the, particularly the second shingles shot and they really got ill and said, oh gee, do I really, when am I gonna do this?