Eric Topol

But it was more like understanding what makes us tick.

And I was working as a respiratory technician night shift, and I saw, while I was in the intensive care unit changing the equipment,

It was like Lazarus.

These patients, I was thinking the next day they wouldn't be there.

And then all of a sudden they would come back to life on their way to full recovery.

That prompted me to change my plan of going on to be someday a genetics professor of sorts to, oh, maybe I should just be a doctor and change into medicine.

Yeah, that was a real shocker.

So many years ago, we started a unique project of finding people who were at least 80 years old who'd never been sick and on no medications.

This is a rarefied group, but the whole idea was there'd been so little work on the genetics of healthspan.

There'd been a fair amount to look at some genetics of people who were centenarians with extreme lifespan, but that's different from people who never had an age-related disease.

It took seven years to find 1,400 participants.

And then once we had them all together, we did whole genome sequencing to look for what was the genomic underpinnings to see if they were different than the people who we call the Elderly group.

The stunning result was, well, there were some small differences.

Otherwise, there was not much to be able to say this was a genetic story at all.

So this was either due to luck, which seems that's far-fetched to say all these people were so lucky, or something else.

And I think the something else is what we've learned so much about in the last couple of years especially.

that the immune system of people, when it's intact, really helps to withstand these major age-related diseases.

So although that has some connect with our genetics and our DNA, it's also highly influenced by our lifestyle choices and our environment and so many other factors.

Exactly.

So a elderly or super-ager, as we would define it now, is somebody who's reached 80 and older and has never had a significant cardiovascular disease, a cancer, or a neurodegenerative disease.