Dr. Eric Topol
Appearances
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
So sleep health is far more important to prevent these age-related diseases than we'd ever really recognized before.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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,
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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
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SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Then the next, of course, is the problem with microplastics that are getting to every part of our body and especially our heart arteries and our brain and implicated in conditions like heart attacks, strokes, and higher risk of dementia. So how do we get rid of plastics? That's hard. We can certainly reduce the intake of things that are in plastics.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Don't microwave things that are in plastic containers. Don't use plastic any way we can avoid it. And that, of course, also applies to forever chemicals that are pervasive in so many things where we unfortunately, Dana, don't have
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
the national priority like they do in some parts of Europe and other parts of the world to reduce the toll of these major environmental risks that are unfortunately mitigating the progress that we're making. So we can do some things at the individual and family level, but we also need things to occur at the national level.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
So we don't know yet whether that will take hold, but it's a really intriguing prospect. And the point is we each metabolize the food that we eat, the things that we drink totally differently. So if you and I had the exact same food, the amount, the exact same timing, one of us would have potentially a glucose spike and the other one would have no increase in glucose at all.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
And the same would be with other things like lipids. So the point being is that if we can understand what is the uniqueness of each of us, And we can do that starting now with sensors and other ways, like our gut microbiome, which turns out to be very important.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Great to be with you, Dana.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Then perhaps we'll get to a point where we can say, these foods are not good for you because they're potentially going to increase your progression from prediabetes to diabetes. On the other hand, these foods might help you reduce your risk of cancer. And so each of us has propensity for either benefit or potential hazard from foods. And so a lot of work is being done to decode all that.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
And the NIH has a very big study that's ongoing. And hopefully over the years ahead, we might be able to crack the case. But it's still something that's a prospect and not a reality yet.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about that because now we have to consider the blue zones as a real myth. The more it's been looked into very carefully, the absence of evidence for the healthy aging longevity in these zones of the world has never been confirmed.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
poor records and inability to confirm the data about these people that were thought to be these special, exceptional, healthy agers is a real problem. There's no question that we, as I present in the book, 98-year-old people who are completely healthy, never had an age-related chronic disease, But there doesn't appear to be any zone in the world that is special.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
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.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
There may be a cluster of people here and there, like in Okinawa or Italy, as was presented in Blue Zones. But it's been hyped up, unfortunately, to the nth degree, and it just lacks the substantial evidence to support it.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
What excites me and what I think is very different is from this science of aging, That is, we have all these clocks now we didn't have before. And so the near term, one of those things we just talked about may click eventually, but none of them are there yet. And it may take years before any are shown to be safe and effective.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
But on the other hand, we can now predict a person's arc of age-related diseases now, unlike ever before, and it's just going to keep getting better. And that's why I think the science of aging brings us today to a lot of exciting potential.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Because if we can suppress the three age-related big diseases, the big killers, that's accomplishing a huge amount that doesn't necessitate one of these elegant approaches to reverse aging. Instead of reversing aging, it's preventing the age-related diseases.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better
Thanks so much for having me, Dana.