Dr. Eric Topol

speaker

954 appearances 18 recordings 4 series first heard May 2025 last heard 14 May

Dr. Eric Topol’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 13.

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Ground Truths · Katie Couric and Eric Topol: On the State of US Life Science and Extending Healthspan · 12 Jun 2025 podcast

That is a big, big plus to have you as part of Substack.

Thank you.

The Excerpt · SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better · 8 May 2025 podcast

Great to be with you, Dana.

Well, we don't really want to live to 110. and be demented or have all sorts of other chronic diseases. But on the other hand, if we could live well into our 90s and have no chronic diseases, the big three, age-related ones, cancer, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative, that would be the goal. So I think most everyone would agree that healthspan overrides lifespan or longevity.

So some years ago, we did a study we called the Welderly, and we enrolled 1,400 people, average age of almost 87, who had never had a chronic illness. an age-related disease. And we thought the whole genome sequencing was going to demystify everything. But as it turned out, we found very little. And so really the emphasis that has been put on our genes for healthy aging is misplaced.

It's a small component, but there are many other factors, especially what I call lifestyle plus factors that appear to play the dominant role.

Well, as a cardiologist, I would always advocate aerobic exercise. Yeah, like, you know, certainly walking and bicycling, treadmill, swimming, that sort of thing. But what has been really extraordinary in recent years is the data that supports

strength or resistance training, as well as balance training, things like posture, but especially getting stronger as we get older because our muscle mass is decreasing. And to counter that, to prevent frailty, to promote healthy aging, resistance training, which is advocated at least three times a week, is something that's really quite important.

It's a great question, Dana, because the GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic caught us by surprise because, as I wrote in the book, for 20 years they were around for diabetes, but the people taking these medications with diabetes didn't have much weight loss, so we were misled.

And now we're seeing not just the marked effects on weight loss, but also on many other conditions, even some not related to weight loss at all. But the overriding thing is the lifestyle factors, the exercise, the types of nutrition and diet, and that does include our body weight, and also, of course, sleep.

But then the lifestyle factors extend to things like social isolation, time in nature, exposure to environmental toxins like small particulate air pollution, microplastics, forever chemicals, and the list goes on. But we have an admixture where lifestyle factors are the most important.

But now we have a drug class that came out of nowhere in recent years that is probably the most momentous drug class due to its reduction of inflammation. And of course, it's now being tested in Alzheimer's in people who are not even overweight.

Yeah, so the glymphatics, not lymphatics, are the drainage system for our brain, which gets activated during deep sleep, the slow wave type of sleep. And that deep sleep is so essential. Unfortunately, as we get older, it gets decreased in amount of time. It tends to come in the earlier phases of sleep. Interestingly, not, you think deep that it would be late in the night, but it's not the case.

And we want to maximize that because that's the best way we get our brains refreshed and get rid of the stuff that's in our brain through the glymphatic system, which is relatively recent discovery that there's this elaborate system for basically pumping out these things toxins from our brain that accumulate each day.

So sleep health is far more important to prevent these age-related diseases than we'd ever really recognized before.

I think this is now the next frontier. It's so exciting to see this starting to take hold. If you have all of a person's data, and now we have tests that can predict Alzheimer's over 20 years before it happens, and all three of the big age-related diseases take at least 20 years to incubate,

So if you have all of a person's data, and now that includes things like organ clocks from a blood sample, these new proteins like PTAU217 for Alzheimer's, and so-called epigenetic clocks, So the point here is that the science of aging has brought us all these new data types we never had before.

So we can take a person and say, you know, you're not at risk for any of these three major diseases, or we can say, pinpoint, you're at risk for this disease and say when, not just that you're at risk. And so that gives us the ability to, with AI, it requires multimodal AI because it's billions of data points, but that gives us the ability to start to

put a person under surveillance for that concern, that disease, and get all over it and prevent it. Something we've never been able to do in the history of medicine.

So this is something that's basically chasing our tails. We have all these new capabilities for promoting healthy aging and healthy longevity. But on the other hand, we're seeing increased exposure to air pollution, which is difficult to counter except for having air filtration in your home and being attentive to air quality.

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