Chapter 1: What does it mean to be a super-ager?
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And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, a guide to being a super-ager, living long and well. It's a strange moment for growing old. We live in an era when some seem to be suggesting that aging... I'm that crazy guy trying to not die.
...is optional. He spends $2 million a year attempting to... I think we're entering into a new era where death may no longer be inevitable.
Silicon Valley elite, celebrities, and influencers alike race against the clock to limit signs of aging.
We are essentially hacking human biology.
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Chapter 2: How does lifestyle influence aging and health span?
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.
So it's interesting then that some of your most recent research is actually saying, Jeans, we thought you were super important when it comes to aging. Actually, not so much.
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.
Eric and his team called this group of super-aging healthy anomalies over the age of 80 the Welderly.
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.
That's elderly, the people, most of us, who typically have at least one major age-related illness by age 65. Eric and the Scripps research team looked for the longevity secrets in the DNA of elderly super-agers. And what they found changed everything they thought they knew about how humans age.
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.
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Chapter 3: What role do genetics play in aging according to Dr. Topol?
How we exercise, how we sleep, how we have social engagement, a long list of lifestyle plus factors. But also, we've only learned in recent times that there are other ways to keep that immune system intact. And one of the big surprises was, for example, the shingles vaccine.
Mm-hmm.
We didn't know. And now with four huge natural experiments in four different countries around the world, in Wales and Canada and Australia and the U.S., we've learned that the shingles vaccine reduces Alzheimer's and dementia by at least 20 to 25 percent.
Oh, wow.
And it isn't because it's working against the virus herpes zoster so much. as it's keeping the immune system intact, because people that get the vaccine are older people. In the U.S., it's age 50. In other countries, it's even older. But that's just one new trick we've learned. And now, you know, that's a segue to many other tactics we'll use in the future to keep people's immune system intact.
So I recently got my first shingles shot, and it certainly was not touted to me as preventive medicine for anything other than getting shingles, which I'm told is very painful and just awful. Why is this not more public knowledge that there is more information out there about the added benefits of vaccines and other preventive medicines?
This is so startling. if this was a drug to reduce Alzheimer's disease, it would be a blockbuster. Everyone would know about it because the pharma companies would be all over it. But because it's a vaccine and we live in an anti-vax moment, this wasn't expected. This was a surprise.
It's not just been replicated, but now four different what we call natural experiments, which are better than even randomized trials in many respects. So I don't think the word is out there. I've been trying to help get it out, but there hasn't been enough work to disseminate these very important findings. And it isn't just gonna be this vaccine.
We're gonna have lots of other ways to improve the immune system. So for example, Very recently, we learned about the importance of the thymus gland. And the thymus gland, which is... I don't even remember what that is. The medical world has forgotten it exists.
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Chapter 4: What are the five domains that predict age-related disease risk?
Right, right. Yeah, I think if you stick to the evidence and not just opinions— You know, there's evidence-based and then there's eminence-based. Stick to the former. You'll be okay. But you're only going to get that from the highest level of peer-reviewed journals and people who are committed to presenting the evidence in a forthright way.
I mean, this is what happens when information goes everywhere. Part of us wants to just be told what to do. We want there to be easy to understand rules, guidelines that we can follow without having to overthink it. Some of us get a little weird if we have too many data points.
But I think what you're saying is we are heading into an era of personalized medicine that is extraordinary and we need to do a better job to embrace it.
Absolutely. Particularly this field of longevity and healthy aging. It's a bit like the dis- and misinformation that we saw throughout the COVID pandemic. We got to get this right because there's so much opportunity here to promote healthy aging that a lot of people are not really aware of.
And if we do get on track with this and people do get the right word, it can make a world of difference in their healthy aging. Age lies. Just lifestyle alone has been shown. If you start age 50 and you attend to all the things that we know, you can get seven to 10 years more of healthy aging. And people don't even know that.
So there's so much we can get out there that's really high quality information that should help people.
Right. And I think that was my biggest takeaway from your book, that it's really never too late to start changing your aging destiny. We actually here at NPR partnered with Columbia University Medical School to do a clinical trial on the health benefits of incorporating short movement breaks into our days.
Right.
We had 20,000 people sign up. I actually ended up writing a book about it that's coming out soon. And what we found was that older people actually had different challenges in terms of changing their lifestyle. You know, they're not stuck at a desk all day anymore. They're actually more active during the day. But these long periods of the evenings from, say, 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., they would sit.
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