Gene Therapy: How to Reprogram Your DNA (THIS Works) | Sharon Hausman-Cohen

The breakthrough that's happened in the field of genomics in the last 10 years is realizing that chronic diseases, cognitive decline, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, autism, they're not because of one gene. You can use your genomics to determine do they have problems with getting enough blood flow to the brain and even within that, is it because they don't make enough nitric oxide or is it because they're hypercoagulable? Do they have mitochondrial membrane issues? Do they have issues with transporting choline?

Your DNA holds the blueprint for your health. And Dr. Sharon Houseman Cohen is the scientist decoding it. Harvard trained physician, 25 years in integrative medicine, co founder and chief medical officer of intel xdna, the precision genomics tool unlocking the future of personalized health.

This particular gene's involved in a couple of things. These are the kinds of things that you can learn about using Intellix DNA.

She's not just studying the science, she's rewriting the playbook. From cognitive decline to cardiometabolic disease, autism to the so called unsolvable cases, her work is helping top physicians crack the code on root cause medicine.

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It gives me a more targeted approach.

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Intellect, DNA isn't just a tool, it's a revolution. Dr. Houseman Cohen's research is fueling cutting edge studies, including Those led by Dr. Dale Bredesen, proving that DNA driven medicine isn't the future. It's happening now.

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Longevity seekers, health disruptors. The next frontier of medicine is here, and Dr. Sharon Houseman Cohen is leading the way.

I've done gene therapy to reduce my age by about nine years. Why do you think we can't change our genetics? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Sharon, you have a master's degree in cell biology and you're a position. It seems like we've had a genetics fetish over the past 30 years and we discovered DNA and we got into all this stuff and we all got our genetics done. And I got a report back and it said you're 0.1% strange Russian shamanic tribe and you have a 10 increase in risk of something that isn't a very big risk anyway and it was sort of a big yawn. How useful are genetics for longevity?

Well, I think you have to look at the right things. And so when, when genetics started, people Started with pharmacogenomics, people started with cancer genetics, and then nutrigenomics came along and all of them had their place. But if you're really wanting to look at longevity, you have to understand cognition. You know, what makes up longevity, Heart, bones, brain. And you can't just look at one gene variant.

So it's sort of like the bucket of all of your genes is useful for longevity.

Yes. And it's. I think that looking at some of the genes that are less common but clinically significant, and that's another huge piece, is if you just look at genes and you're like, okay, I have a copy of. I'm gonna pick on MTHFR because it's a pretty pop gene, right? Well, 45% of people have a copy of MTHFR, so how important could that be? You know that, yes, methylation's important, but. But if you have somebody that has cognitive decline, you can use your genomics to determine do they have problems with getting enough blood flow to the brain? And even within that, is it because they don't make enough nitric oxide, or is it because they're hypercoagulable? Do they have mitochondrial membrane issues? Do they have issues with transporting choline? Or.

Wait a minute, do you have my genetic profile with that list? Literally, I have nitric oxide genes, I have sulfation genes, I have mthfr, I have blood flow issues to the brain. And there was one other in there. So are these common problems or am I just like. Am I.

Well, some. No, no. I'm pretty sure your brain's working really quite well.

It's pretty happy.

But I think that some of them are common. So the gene that relates to choline, for example, it does give you about a 60% increased risk of cognitive decline. And that one's fairly common.

I don't have that one.

That one's like 40% of the population. But some of them are common, some of them are less common. There are gene variants that. So the one that relates to mitochondrial membranes, it can give you more than double the risk, again, of dementia. It's 2.7 times the risk. And that one's in, like 25%. But no one gene causes Alzheimer's. And I think that the breakthrough that's happened in the field of genomics in the last 10 years is realizing that chronic diseases, cognitive decline, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, autism, they're not because of one gene. They're not sickle cell or Tay Sachs. They're because of a combination of gene variants interacting with each other, but also with diet, lifestyle, the environment. And together, by understanding the components, you can then improve these specific things that may run in your family or, or that you're at risk for.

A friend who's been on the show and been a, an inspiration for me is Bruce Lipton, cell biologist turned biology of belief epigenetics guy. And, and some people have noted that biohacking, when I, I first defined the word it, it's a restatement of epigenetics, particularly around longevity. And epigenetics being the environment, affects genes. Can you separate epigenetics from genetics?

Well, I think epigenetics is an answer to genomics or genetics. And so if you think of your. So genetic diseases are ones that are inherited. You know, mom has one copy, dad has one copy, you get it. But genomic issues are things that are small changes in your DNA that increase your risk for something, but they're not what we call pathogenic. They don't cause it. And epigenetics is how we respond to it. So let's take TNF alpha. So there's lots of different kinds of inflammation, but TNF alpha causes leaky blood brain barriers, it causes leaky blood gut barriers. And some people make much more TNF alpha because they have an overactive promoter. So if you have a gene variant that makes that TNF alpha promoter four to five times more active, you can't change it. Your promoter is kind of hyperactive. But what you can do is use things, diet and lifestyle to decrease the transcription and kind of slow the transcription and the expression of TNF alpha down. And you might need that more than someone else. So lion's mane mushroom is great for TNF alpha. Even chili peppers is really good for TNF alpha. Sulforaphane. And there's many different things. And so the way that I think of epigenetics is how do we respond to our genome to say, oh, nothing I can do about it? Well, that's not the biohacker way. It's like, let's understand it and become empowered by it. Because there's so many things that can help your longevity, and how do you know which ones are right for you? I mean, resveratrol can increase the expression of Clotho, which is an important longevity gene. But if you're already the high Clotho type of genotype, that may not be the most important thing for you, even though it's important for many people.

So with genes, if you have both alleles and it's mthfr, you Know that whatever environmental things you do, you're not going to turn off a gene when it can't be turned off because it's all you have. Right. And you can't turn on something that isn't present. So epigenetics has great power. But what you can do and what I do is, well, I know that my body will overproduce this thing or under produce it. Therefore I will block it. Right. And it becomes complex at one level. But if you look at symptoms like I've, for most of my life I've had really strong muscle tension between my shoulder blades, upper back to the point. In my 20s, it felt like a candle burning there. It was a lot of pain, like probably 7 out of 10 just all the time. And some of it has to do with liver and toxins and I get rid of those. But ultimately for me, it's a catecholamine issue. And the way my body makes things like adrenaline and cortisol and noradrenaline. And I finally figured it out and some of it's genetic and, and if I take the right substances, I am golden. I have no muscle tension and I have no pain in my body. I could have done that, you know, geez, 40 years ago, had we had the right genetic screening and understood the pathways. Now we understand those things, but I didn't do it with genetics, I just did it with symptoms. How far along the path are we of using genetics to be able to turn off symptoms? Like, are we a third of the way? Are we all the way?

I think it depends on what topic. We're making great headways in certain fields because I came from a neuroscience background. We do a lot of NeuroScience with Intellix DNA, which is the company where I head the research. So we do a lot. We've done a lot with cognition, a lot with autism, a lot with mental health. But we also, in uncovering the foundations of all of health, looking at the detox pathways extensively and inflammation and many other things, we actually have surprisingly been able to help a lot with pain. We've had patients where their pain. You can have three patients. Your pain may be because you have all this high adrenaline, different genes, and there's a lot of different adrenergic receptors and compt and such. But I had a patient and she literally was limping in and she was a photographer and she said that by the end of the day she would have to crawl up her stairs because she was in so much pain.

Wow.

And she really wasn't somebody who wanted to do 20 things.

And.

And in her genomics, it became really clear that she had something called Factor 2, which gives you increased fibrinogen, which makes it so you don't get enough blood flow.

I had that.

She did not transport B12 into her brain or CSF. Well, and that's pretty common. That's about 18% of the population. That's TCN2. But then she also had seven times the risk of gluten intolerance. And she had a few other things. But just by having her get rid of gluten, adding some pycnogenol and lumbrokinase to address the fibrinogen and B12 in four days, she was able to literally run up the stairs. And she hadn't done that for years. But then there was another patient and she's a makeup artist, and she would get pain in her arms and muscle cramps and dropping things. And for her, the secret was she couldn't make CoQ10, but also couldn't recycle CoQ10 to its antioxidant form to the UBQH form or vitamin E. So for her, getting rid of her pain was vitamin E and ubqh. And again, for you, it was things that lower your cortisol.

So I think increased cortisol, surprisingly.

Oh, you had low cortisol?

Yeah, I had to increase noradrenaline was for me, yeah.

So difficulty converting, like dopamine to noradrenaline and such. And so there's. Everybody is different. And so I think that genomics can take us a long way towards getting well, but the science is still in its infancy. So we have a list of a hundred different topics that we're working on that actively, but there's hundreds and hundreds more.

It feels like to me, maybe we're 10% of the way into this knowledge.

I think that that's reasonable. And so what we do is we start with the common things. I mean, I'm not going to start. Someone asked me if I would work on. It was something that, oh, it was a lipidemia. And there's nothing wrong with helping people with lipidemia, but it's not common. And so I'm like, well, we're still working on fertility and heart disease and diabetes and cognitive decline. And so we'll put it on the list, but it's not happening tomorrow.

I mean, you're a longevity doctor, and I don't know if you read my longevity book or not, but I said, look, there's these big four Killers and subsequent books in the space have called them the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I didn't do that. That felt a little bit alarmist. But it's heart disease, it's cancer, it's Alzheimer's, and it's diabetes. And if we just handle those things, then you get to the weird people like me who have 18 different weird genetic pathways. And I honestly think I would be disabled. I bought disability insurance when I was 26 because I'm like, so many things don't work and the doctors are useless, and maybe out of. I don't like to hurt all the time and feel dumb. I. I struggled my way out of it, and I'm lucky that I made a bunch of money in my 20s, even though I lost it. But I. I managed to figure out the combinations and to learn the pathways. I didn't do it genetically. I did it via systems biology. And understanding this leads to this leads to this. And there's a blockage here. And it was a lot of work, and no one should ever have to do that. AI is pretty good. But now that we have the type of work you're doing with genetics, I have the ability to say, well, here's the top three things that make my life not as good as I want it to be. Maybe it's brain fog. Right. Maybe it's pain, and maybe it's the arthritis I was diagnosed with when I was 14. Or it's low energy. Right? And when people come through at upgrade labs and they do a survey. So what matters to you? Was it cognitive function or longevity? You got to pick one. And, like, why do you want both? Yeah, do them in order.

Right, I agree.

So then I could look at one of the reports that you do. Right? And I could say, well, all right, I want to look at this report through the lens of let's not hurt anymore. Or I want my brain to not keep forgetting words. And how do you guide people, though, when they get a report to know this is the one that matters for you?

Well, that was actually one of my goals as well. So people would come to me bringing their 23andMe and say, I've got a family history of Alzheimer's, or I've got macular degeneration in my family or heart disease or whatever it was. And there was no tool out there that mapped out by topics that we as human beings as well as physicians want to think about. So the way that we use genomics is in our Cognition and Memory report, for example, we'll put together all the gene variants that increase and decrease the risk of Alzheimer's or cognitive decline by at least 20%. Some of them may be 200%, some may be 80%. And then we'll look at what does the gene variant do, and then what can you do to modulate that with diet, lifestyle supplements, medications. But additionally, because I'm a functional medicine physician, we also look at detox, inflammation, extensive detox, extensive inflammation, lots of pathways, nutrients, gi. And usually if you address those foundational gene variants and then you look at the ones associated with the specific diseases, you'll find answers. But some of the people who've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, their gene variants aren't in Alzheimer's pathways. They're in brain ischemia pathways, things that affect oxygen or in things that affect the myelination of the nerves, white matter changes. So we, we went broad, and then we started using it with doctors. Physicians across the country showed that we can get results of improvement in cognition. And then we went to the next topic. And so we built it by topic. And so that's what I was saying. We now cover a good 40 or 50 common topics, but we don't cover every single esoteric disease state that someone.