Andrew Steele
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So some of the things are surprisingly obvious, you know, making sure you don't eat too much, smoking, exercise, that kind of thing, not drinking too much, getting enough sleep. But actually the other thing that can happen is that by understanding the aging biology, you can uncover some slightly less conventional bits of health advice that are nonetheless really important.
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I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. So we've begun to understand that a lot of the aging process is driven by a process called chronic inflammation. So let's unpack what that means. Inflammation is the process by which your immune system goes and fights off various threats.
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So it can fight off, you know, an infection or it could rush to the site of an injury to try and start the healing process. And when you're youthful, that process is often acute, i.e. it turns on very rapidly when it's needed and it turns off again once the immune system's done its job.
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but as we get older this process can become sort of chronic it can just be turned on a little tiny bit all the time kind of a paranoia in your immune system what's going on if you have poor oral health well you've got bacteria in your mouth they're infecting your gums they might be decaying your teeth and the reason that the dentist has you know such a sort of comparatively primitive set of tools they can yank out teeth they can drill holes in them is because your immune system never quite wins this battle so there's this constant process of inflammation going on in your mouth
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Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia.
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So again, it just seems like the whole body is this incredibly interconnected thing and keeping one part of it healthy can have huge effects on the whole aging process of every single part of it.
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And actually, the genetic contribution to longevity is surprisingly small for people who live a normal length of time. So if your parents lived to 70 or 80, you really shouldn't see that as a ceiling on your own lifespan. We think that genetics only contributes maybe somewhere between 5 and 20% of how long you can go on to live.
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But the one exception to this is the people who do live in exceptionally long time. So people who make it into their hundreds, centenarians. There seems to be a huge genetic component to this. In fact, if your parents are centenarians, or if you have a centenarian parent, or if you have a sibling who makes it into their hundreds, you've got a 10 times greater chance of doing so yourself.
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And it really seems that the way in which these centenarians make it to these advanced ages is they've just got protection from age-related disease. They really do just age slower than the rest of us. So if you look at studies of centenarians, they don't tend to be much healthier than the general population. They're still a little bit overweight. They often smoke.
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Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
They often drink just as much as regular people do. But the fact is that they've got the genetics that keeps them...
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Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
It's a really fascinating subject. And so the record for longevity is 122 years held by a French woman called Jeanne Calment. And she set that record in 1997, I think, which is really quite incredible. I think the fact is that people who make it to these exceptionally old ages, they're just so rare that it's very, very hard for that record to be pushed back and back.
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But also, I think you are right that, you know, with the current state of You know, no matter how well you live, no matter what medical care you have access to, it's very, very unlikely with the current state of medicine that you're going to be able to live longer than that. The only way that you can stop your body falling apart on that schedule is to intervene in the aging process itself.
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Because as I sort of alluded to earlier, you know, say you're 110 and you get cancer and we cure that cancer, there are still loads of other things wrong with your body that are going to probably take you out in the next few years.
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Whereas if we could actually slow down aging, that would mean you could make it to 110 in a much healthier state, and that would completely change the game in terms of the limit on human longevity.
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I mean, I think the best counter to that is just to look at these negligibly senescent animals. I already mentioned tortoises have this property, but it's not just tortoises. There are actually loads of animals out there. So there are various kinds of fish are negligibly senescent. There's a salamander. There's a tiny little water creature called a hydra.
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There's a bit closer to us on the evolutionary tree, something called a naked mole rat, which is a rodent, a bit like a rat or a mouse. But whereas mice live, you know, maybe two or three years in the lab, naked mole rats live to 30. They seem to be almost immune to cancer. They're almost immune to neurodegeneration.
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But most importantly, their risk of death is basically constant throughout their adult lives. And then, you know, they suddenly basically fall off a cliff when they get ill toward the very end of their lives. And so, you know, this isn't a biological impossibility. The fact is that we aren't cars. We've got these incredible self-repairing capacities inside ourselves.
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And if we can just learn how to augment those with medicine, there's no reason why we couldn't keep ourselves going healthier for longer.
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I think there is like a frustrating degree of randomness to this because the fact is that you know in order to get cancer you have to get something like an average of 10 mutations and those mutations have to be in one particular cell.
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So say you've got nine mutations in one of your cells right now then you know it could just basically be luck whether you get that tenth one and whether that becomes a cancer and then whether that cancer is spotted by your immune system is partly down to luck.
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and whether that cancer then goes on to accumulate further mutations that allow it to spread throughout the body and cause serious disease that might go on to kill you. Again, all of these things are, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle, but at the end of the day, some people do die of cancer in their 30s.
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The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, you know, it's... like we were discussing earlier, the odds of death for someone in their 30s are about one in a thousand a year, which is incredibly low. So if we can just get a little bit closer to that, then people could live much longer, healthier lives.
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And the reason that I'm particularly excited about trying to follow all this lifestyle advice now is because it means that if I can live a little bit longer, that gives scientists longer to perfect some of these treatments. And then by living longer with those treatments, that gives scientists longer still.
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So, you know, say, for example, I can keep myself good and healthy, you know, into my 60s, 70s, 80s. I'll be healthy enough to benefit from that first generation of senolytic drugs that can remove those aged cells and increase my lifespan. I'll be able to benefit from other new treatments that are developed over the next few decades.
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And if that gives me more years of healthy life still, I can develop, sorry, I can benefit from whatever treatments are developed after that as well. So I think we're just living at this pivotal time where the longer you live, the more medical technology is going to be available. So I think, yeah, to sort of neglect your own health at a time like this is doing yourself a huge disservice.
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anything else about the way we're living or the things we're doing anything else that that really affects our longevity that maybe people don't realize i think something that's been illustrated perhaps a bit more to us over the last year but still hasn't necessarily entered the consciousness is the importance of the prevention of infectious disease there's actually some quite good evidence that um children who grew up in environments of lower infection and obviously this really started to transform in the first part of the 20th century with
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vaccines and antibiotics and improvements in hygiene kids started to be able to grow up without this huge spectrum of childhood diseases and what they found is that by looking back at this they seem to age better as well so it seems as though you know having less of that inflammation caused by disease throughout your life can improve um can improve your health in the longer term.
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And we also know there are certain cancers that are specifically caused by particular viruses, particular bacteria. So I think avoiding infectious disease, quite apart from avoiding the immediate misery of being ill, is a really good thing to do to try and extend your lifespan overall.
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I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. What we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia.
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And that's exactly what really excites me about this actual anti-aging medicine, real anti-aging medicine. Because the fact is that if we did cure cancer, unfortunately, we tend to treat these diseases in silos. So you find a lump, you might go to your general practitioner, your general practitioner refers you to an oncologist,
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that oncologist will give you chemotherapy, maybe operate on your tumour, etc, etc. All of this is really focused on getting rid of that cancer, that single problem. But actually, you know, you might have a host of other problems by the age that you're traditionally diagnosed with cancer.
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You might have diabetes, you might have a heart condition that's sort of nascent and not necessarily quite as advanced as the cancer yet. You've got all these other problems brewing.
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But the point is that by treating the aging process, because we know that your risk of disease goes up exponentially with age, if we can sort of flatten that curve, we can reduce that exponential increase of disease, that can hit all of those diseases at the same time. It can reduce our risk of cancer, reduce our risk of heart disease, reduce our risk of dementia.
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And it's also really important to say that it's not just the diseases, it's the frailty, it's the cognitive decline, it's the incontinence. All of these things aren't necessarily going to actually take your life, but dramatically reduce the quality of it. all of these things are caused by the same biological processes.
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And so by intervening in these biological processes, we effectively will give you extra years, perhaps not in your 30s, depending on when you start taking the drugs. But if we can stretch out your 60s so they last 15 years in comparatively good health, then that's going to be a massive improvement over the situation we have today.
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Thank you very much. Cheers.
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Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I mean, that's exactly right. And I think one of the big challenges that I've overcome is to explode people's conventional wisdom about what aging is. But what I mean by aging as a biologist, actually, the simplest definition isn't a biological definition at all. It's a statistical one. And it's simply how fast your risk of death increases with time.
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As a human, our rate of aging as a species is that our risk of death doubles about every eight years. So let's try and put that into some kind of context. I'm 36, and that means my odds of death this year are about one in a thousand. And actually, you know, I quite like those odds. If that were to continue for the rest of my life, I'd live into my thousand and thirties on average.
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But of course, that isn't what happens. My risk of death will carry on doubling every eight years. And so that means if there are no advances in medical science between now and me, you know, fingers crossed making it into my nineties, my odds of death by then will be one in six per year, life and death at the roll of a dice.
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And so, you know, as a biologist, you look at this and there's this exponentially increasing risk of death with time. That is the problem that we call aging.
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Yeah, I guess you've got to look at that as 0.1%. And actually most of that, when you're my age, is still down to external things. We call them extrinsic forms of mortality biologically. So that's things like car accidents and unfortunately suicide is a really big cause of death for men at my age as well.
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So it's not generally the sort of cancers and the heart disease and that sort of stuff that you associate with older age. It's the external causes of death. And then obviously as you get older, the risk of diseases increases and starts to swamp those external causes.
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Well, this is the fascinating thing because obviously that happens to cars, it happens to machines, it happens to our pets, it happens to our farm animals. You know, you can easily imagine that aging is a universal process. But actually this just isn't the case because we've got a huge advantage as biological organisms. We can repair ourselves.
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If we didn't have these incredibly intricate mechanisms of repair that are buzzing away inside of our cells every single hour of every single day, all the time, you know, correcting mistakes, disposing of rubbish, that kind of thing, we would die an awful lot sooner than we actually do.
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And in fact, there are some animals that have got so good at repairing themselves that their risk of death doesn't change with time. That's a phenomenon that in biology we call negligible senescence. So negligible just meaning, you know, not much, and senescence is just the biological term for growing old.
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So the reason there's a tortoise on the cover of my book is because that is a negligibly senescent animal. It's an animal whose risk of death stays constant when it becomes an adult. And that means that they can live an incredibly long time. But most importantly, it's not just their risk of death that stays constant. They also don't have any increase in frailty as they get older.
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They stay reproductively active no matter how old they are. That means that they grow older, but without growing old in the way that we humans do. And so I hope that by understanding the biology of aging, we can try and transfer some of that wisdom and some of those sort of biological techniques to keep us sprightly into our old age too.
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The goal is definitely health, and I think that you've got to think about what actually kills you. Although decades ago it was permissible for doctors to write death by old age on an older person's death certificate, now we understand that you can't just die of old age. You die of heart disease, you die of cancer, you die of dementia.
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One of these diseases that are much more likely as you get older, and these diseases too get exponentially more likely as you increase in age, that's something that eventually becomes severe enough to take your life. And so, you know, it's very much the pain, the suffering, all of these things together that we want to try and get rid of.
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And actually, it's a really good way of thinking about it, is to think about a lot of modern medicine seeks to treat individual diseases. But even if we had, hypothetically, a complete success treating an individual disease, and let's take the example, imagine that, you know, we cured cancer tomorrow. That would only add about three years to human life expectancy.
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And that's because, you know, if you avoid getting cancer, you've probably already got a bit of heart disease or diabetes or, you know, dementia starting, you know, waiting in the wings to kill you as you get older. And so that means that it doesn't make you healthier for much longer.
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Whereas by treating the aging process, the thing that causes all of these diseases, we can potentially defer those diseases, maybe even prevent them entirely and create a lot more healthy years for people.
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These are all good ideas, and they're definitely something that I would encourage people to do, but the fact is we can go beyond this with medicine. And I think the best way to explain this is with an example.
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One of the biological processes behind aging is the accumulation of aged senescent cells, and they build up in our bodies as we get older, and we know that they're responsible for a whole range of age-related diseases. And we've also got drugs that can kill those senescent cells while leaving the rest of the cells in the body intact.
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So we've done experiments using these drugs on mice, and we wait till the mice get to about 24 months old. Now mice obviously have a much shorter lifespan than humans, so that's something equivalent to about 70 in human years. So that means we give these old mice the drugs, it clears out those aged cells, and what we find is that the mice basically get biologically younger.
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They live a bit longer, which is a good thing, but they're not just sort of stumbling along in ill health, unable to muster the energy even to die. They're healthier, they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. They're less frail, so they can run further and faster on the little mousy treadmills that they use in these experiments. They're more curious.
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So if you put a young mouse in a maze, it's often very exploratory. It wants to look around its new environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious, maybe just a bit lazier, because it's a bit more frail. And by giving mice these senolytic drugs that kill the senescent cells, you restore some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these animals, they just look great.
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You know, I was a computational biologist, so I never dealt with mice in the lab. And if you look at a picture of one of these mice that's had these drugs, they've got better fur, they've got thicker, plumper skin. They just look fantastic. And so the point is, you know, you can't diet and exercise and live a good life to a healthy, you know, guaranteed healthy hundred years old.
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Whereas by using some of these drugs that could potentially slow down, maybe even reverse the aging process, we can allow ourselves to live longer and healthier than any current lifestyle intervention would allow.
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Well, we're going to have to wait for some of the clinical trials to happen. So I'm very excited that these things are going to be here in time for all of us because they're already in human clinical trials. But at the moment, you know, mostly we're looking at results in mice and we've got the first tentative results starting to come out in humans.
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So hopefully in the next five or so years, we're going to have some of those answers. Do these drugs work in humans as well as they do in mice? And we can start thinking about taking them.
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It actually is, yeah. There's a fascinating study that was done a few years ago where people were asked to rate the photographs of other people to guess how old they thought they were. And what they found was that people who looked older tended to have a greater risk of dying in the near future and a greater risk of contracting certain diseases.
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And actually, what this really tells us is that there is a sort of fundamental collection of underlying processes that are responsible not just for your internal aging, but for your external aging as well. And so someone who is wrinklier, someone whose hair is a bit grayer, they probably have older insides.
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The same processes are giving them an increased risk of cancer, an increased risk of heart disease. And so actually, although I very much hope we don't initially go after these cosmetic things, they're obviously less important. One researcher I spoke to said, you know, I'd far rather have improved, you know, strength and resilience in my arteries than in my skin.
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So, you know, they're not so worried about wrinkly skin, but wrinkly arteries effectively. I actually think we're going to solve quite a few of these cosmetic problems almost by accident because we'll go after the causes of these particular diseases. And then what will happen is those same processes are responsible for the wrinkles, the gray hair, all the external stuff.
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And so we might find that those things improve at the same time.
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The absolute top of my list, and this isn't gonna come as a surprise to anybody listening, is smoking. It's so, so bad for your health. But what you actually find when you dig into health advice is something that's really, really encouraged me actually to make sure I am doing every single thing I possibly can to be that little bit healthier.
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And that's because all these different things that were advised about trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, most of them actually slow down the aging process itself. And I think a really good example of this is exercise.
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Because, you know, when you're sweating away, you know, on a run or something, it's really obvious your lungs are going, you can feel your heart beating in your chest, you know, your muscles are obviously doing an awful lot of exercise. You can see how that exercise is benefiting your muscles, it's strengthening them, it's benefiting your cardiovascular system.
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But actually, this process seems to slow down the aging process as a whole. So it's not just the heart disease that you're deferring by doing exercise. It also defers quite a lot of kinds of cancer. There's even quite good evidence that can reduce the risk of getting dementia and neurodegeneration.
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And you just wouldn't necessarily think that working out on the treadmill or going for a bike ride or lifting weights is going to improve your cognitive health as you get older. But because these processes are also interconnected, it just means that doing exercise All of these bits of health advice can improve your health in so, so many different ways, not just the obvious ones.