Episode 20: Mark's Age Reversal Story

I want to talk about can aging really be reversed? So we hear about anti aging medicine or longevity medicine, wellness functional medicine, but can we reverse age? Can anti aging medicine really lead to turning back the clock? Well, first we have to decide what kind of clock we're talking about. Since chronological age or your years can't be reversed unless we get a time machine. We have to have some other way to measure biologic or physiologic age. And currently the best way to measure is called the epigenetic clock, epi genetic clock. It was first described by Dr. Scott Horbath about a decade ago. And they found, his team found that methylation groups, which are little molecules onto your DNA, can show your biologic or physiologic age. And this epigenetic changes start occurring when you're an embryo and continue throughout your life. And they've really validated this over a decade, showing that we can predict if somebody's going to live longer or shorter lifespan based on how old their genes are. Your genes have to keep replicating, free to grow or stays pretty free to age, of course, occurs during growth as well, and little methylation changes occur during that time. And the epigenetic clock is done with a blood test or a saliva test or a urine test, something where we can get even any tissue can be used. This has been done in animals and plants and humans to determine and track along aging. Now, there's other ways to measure aging besides the genetic aging. Something I like using is called a cimt, the carotid intima media thickness test. That's the age of the arteries. And this looks at the thickness of your arteries compared to your peers, people in your same age group. Are you younger or older than your chronological age for your arteries? And also we can look at brain age. So the brain starts losing volume after about 30 years old. And as the brain loses volume, it predicts when you will develop dementia. So we can pick up dementia decades in advance. We could pick up heart disease decades in advance. It's not typically done because healthcare doesn't cover age prevention or age reversal. But this can be done, and it is being done. One test that I've used is the MyDnaGE. It's my DNA age.com and I think it's about $300. You send a specimen of blood or urine and they give you a comparison of your age to those of your peers. So if you're 50 years old, are your genes 48, are they 52, are they 50? And what can we do to modify that Age. So I'm going to tell you a story about a friend and a patient, a co worker of mine, mark, he's a 61 year old CPA that wanted to be younger and he's really all in on things. He definitely wants to be younger. He's done several things to try to make himself younger and this is his story in 2021, in November, he wanted to make a commitment to getting younger. I had been talking about reversing age and things that I was doing myself and to some of my patients we wanted to get involved. When I was first tested, it was the epigenetic age report and it showed him at 63 he was two years older in his genesis than he was chronologically. And this obviously is disturbing, but that's a fact that happens. So in 2021, November, he was biologically or physiologically 63, but his actual age was 61. We also did the CIMT test, which is the test of the cardiac age and he was 60 years old. So he's one year younger than his chronological age. That was pretty good. He's a little bit younger, not older, and he wanted to intervene on that as well. So one of the things he did for his heart age, he went to visit a friend of mine, Dr. Joel Kahn K HN he's in I think Bingham Farms and he's got a practice, he really works on cardiology without the typical heart catheterizations and drugs, but more on lifestyle changes and supplements and some degree drug therapy to reverse cardiac age. So he worked with Dr. Khan for a year and his CIMT went from a 61 year old man being a 60 year old arteries to a 62 year old man a year later having 51 year old arteries. So his arteries went back, you know, 11 years, so 10 years I guess. 11 years if you add on the pectic. He got older, so he got younger on his cimt. He also did a brain imaging study which we haven't repeated yet. Takes about two years for your brain to get younger. I had done that myself and it took two years and I was able to substantially reverse my brain age. Mark also. Mark also had sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea, which is quite common. And this is where you're having disordered breathing at night, so it might be manifested by loud snoring and sometimes even some choking or waking up. And most people don't know they have apnea, but they're significant. I might notice that they're stopping breathing at night. Or could it be manifested as bad snoring. And his AHI Apnea Hypopnea Index was 26.7, which is pretty bad. It's almost severe. And if somebody has severe sleep apnea, they live on average six or seven years less than somebody that doesn't have apnea. So if we restore sleep apnea to normal or near normal, it should add several years onto somebody's life. And they've also shown that sleep apnea hastens the development of neurocognitive decline, such as Alzheimer's. So if you're trying to live longer, probably should test your sleep and your carotid arteries. And these tests are both inexpensive. The sleep apnea test can be done at home. There's a special device he wears called a watch pet. I wrote a book on this. You can go to allure medical books and get a copy. So his score is 26.7. We did the procedure called night lase and it's a laser procedure, non invasive laser procedure. I think we did it three or four times. We basically reversed his sleep apnea to non significant. So a year later, his sleep apnea score went down to what would be considered essentially normal. Mark did other things as well. He did the fasting, mimicking diet. He went on mostly a plant based diet. He did some hyperbaric oxygen treatments and numerous supplements. He started exercising, which he hadn't been doing before. He did a lot of very specific things. And also he put him on some specific drug therapy to work on reversing his age. Now, I don't want to talk about exactly which drugs were used, because this could sound like medical advice, and this is not for medical advice. I'm giving you a story, what we did, what happened. But I'll kind of go over the classification of drugs that appear to be beneficial to slow down, stop, or even reverse aging. So the first one is a group of drugs called senolytics. S E N O L Y T I C S drug. So your cells go through a process called cellular senescence. Like senile. Cellular senile. And as the cells age, they start becoming mutations. In order to avoid cancer, Our body puts them in a state of sen, where they stop dividing, they get kind of fat, a lot of vacuoles or pockets inside of them. They stop growing. And they also put out this juice telling other cells to stop growing. Well, it was a cancer protective mechanism. And it's also a primary aging mechanism. So cellular senescence or cells becoming senile is a hallmark of aging. And as these senile cells increase in our body, we get things such as heart failure, degeneration of our joints, sagging of our skin, aging of our arteries. And there's a classification of drugs called senolytics, lytic, meaning to destroy. And there's been human studies on using senolytics for various senescent conditions. So we put mark on a three drug cocktail three days in a row every three months for a little over a year. These kill off senile or senescent cells. The next class of drugs is called gero inhibitors, geriatric inhibitors to block. So there's three genetic pathways that we can control for aging. And one of them is called mtor mechanism, mechanistic target rapamycin. And when this target is on, you age. And when it's off, it seems to slow down aging. It's turned on by eating, particularly eating meat and proteins. And it's turned off by fasting. But it's also inhibited by various drugs. So the drug therapy that he took weekly, one drug a week for a year. And this inhibits aging by inhibiting what's called the MTOR pathway. He also took medications that affected sirtuin genetic pathway and AMPK genetic pathway. So there's specific drugs that intervene on these pathways. Now these genetic pathways we want to turn on because when you turn those on, the body goes backwards in the aging. You turn them off. It accelerates aging. Next drug was based on Dr. Greg Fahey's work out of California. He did a trim and trim X trial where he put adult men about their 50s on growth hormone. And he essentially reproduced Dr. Rudman's trial from the 90s done at university of Wisconsin, where they were able to reverse some aspects of aging with growth hormone in addition to a couple other drugs. And we put them on growth hormone releasing hormone, specific growth hormone releasing hormone drug in addition to medications that are synergistic with it. We did two months on, two months off for a year. And here's the outcome. At one year, his biologic age, or we call the epigenetic age, he was 61 years old. He was 63 biologically at 61. A year later, when he was 62 years old, his age went down to 48. In between, we did one halfway through and his age went from 63 down to 61 down to 48. And we see that in the other studies that it starts out kind of slow and about a year it accelerates. This is more than I typically would see a 14 year reversal, somebody's aging. In this case it's actually 15 year reversal. In age because he had aged a year. But if, even if you slow down aging or stop it or reverse it by one year, that may be beneficial. And you do these over and over again. That being said, Mark did a lot of very aggressive things that maybe most people wouldn't want to do. He changed his diet substantially, started exercising, did hyperbaric oxygen, which I don't know if that had an impact on this or not. I went on numerous supplements to modify these genes of aging, as well as drugs to modify these genes of aging. He underwent a nightlase procedure to reverse his sleep apnea, went on bioidentical hormone replacement, and he did all the things that we can imagine right now that are not mainstream yet, but are available to impact aging. What, what's happening in the future? Well, I think these things are not mainstream yet, but the basics would be focusing on slowing. Well, I could break it into three classifications. So first off, we have restore organ function. So let's say you're going to reverse your genetic age, but then you have some degeneration of your joints. Well, you've got, might gonna have some impairment in your mobility and that'll accelerate aging. In fact, we know that somebody with single joint arthritis that's a little bit overweight, they've got a shortened lifespan of four to seven years. So we want to get weight down if possible. We want to manage arthritis and other traditional means has been with drugs and say joint replacement. We use cellular medicine such as, such as stem cell therapy, which are autologous from your body or, or from a placenta or umbilical cord. Not embryo. Some people think that's embryonic. That's not legal. Not available in America. Platelet rich plasma can be used for certain joints if it's not that bad. Reversing sleep apnea. We use night lays, but certainly use a CPAP machine, restoring your hormones to normal levels with bioidentical pellets. We put pellets in the tissue so it's kind of like your stuff's working again. If you have chronic meanness insufficiency manifested by swollen heavy legs, we want to reverse that because that increases your mobility. So that's step one is restoring organ function. Number two is not dying of anything stupid. And Mark went through all this. He did a CIMT to make sure he wasn't gonna have a heart attack. And he actually was pretty good. But he worked to make his cardiac age younger. So now his Cardiac age is 10 years younger. Him. He is, he's not gonna have a heart attack. Got a full body MRI and did the liquid biopsy, which we discussed in previous blogs and podcasts. This is to check for cancer in the earliest stages. If we pick up a cancer that's tiny, like a pistachio nut, more likely you'll survive it than if it's the size of a walnut. So we want to pick these up as soon as possible. About 75% of cancers get missed until it's too late. So that's, that's your options. And then get a quantitative imaging of your brain, which Mark did. And his brain was a little bit older than he is, so he's working on reversing that. And there's things we can do because the brain is what we call plastic, there's neuroplasticity and we can alter the age of the brain brain. So that's number two, don't die anything stupid. Number one, restore organ function. And number three is to slow down, stop and reverse aging. I got this quote from Richard Rossi. He runs my Da Vinci 50 mastermind group. I'm a medical director with them. And this is in this case with senolytic drugs, gero inhibitors, and drugs that reverse the epigenetic clock. So these are what I'm thinking about, what's available now. These drugs are FDA approved for different indications. In some cases they may be supplements. Most of the cases they're drug therapy. FDA for, approved for other indications. FDA approval means that the drug company can market them for specific indication, but your doctor can prescribe them for you for whatever is medically appropriate. So can aging be reversed? Well, you know, we can say the somebody's cardiac age looks younger than it did before. I could say, yes, my heart looks younger than it did a year ago. That's good. You lose weight and get healthier and you have more muscle tone. Yes. Your body physiologically from a musculoskeletal standpoint is younger. Your brain restores neural connections, it gets heavier, there's more weight and less water mass. Yes, the brain is younger. You have no cancers. That's really not youth related. But that's something we want to make sure. We have then our genetic age. As we age, we don't really look at the telomeres anymore. That was useful before. Now it's the epigenetic age. If your epigenetic age goes backwards, does it stay there? These are left to be answered. So we don't really know the long term effects of reversing age. Does it stay, you have to keep doing these things. I'm thinking most cases we have to keep doing certain things to maintain a more youthful age. And you will continue aging. We're not going to create immortality for this, but things are coming in the future with genetic engineering and other significant interventions that could have people help people live to a much older period of life and still feel young. And I think sometimes people misunderstand longevity with laying in a nursing home, drooling for a longer period of time. And I'm really referring to being healthy, having time with your family and your grandkids. Great grandkids. Great, great grandkids, kids. Having relationships, having financial freedom and being active, being mobile. Mobility is a key, paramount aspect of healthy aging. And this is where we're taking our practice. You know, we're helping people look good on the inside and the outside. And, you know, we're considered primarily a cosmetic practice, and that's a big part of our business. But people also want to make themselves look better on the inside. It does. Start with those three steps. Restoring organ function. Don't dye anything stupid. And then after that, what can we do to reverse aging? Thank you very much.