Dr. Greg Eckel covers ways to measure biological age: epigenetic clocks like GrimAge, telomere length, VO2 max, and blood markers. He explains senescent cells and discusses clearing them through caloric restriction, hyperbaric oxygen, and ozone therapy to reduce inflammation and improve energy production.
Questions this video answers
May 13, 2024
Around 80 (mg/dL implied)
As the three-month window of average blood sugars (marker of oxidative stress/damage from sugars and insulin).
Hayflick, 1961
Horvath's GrimAge clock
Chapters
Besides just, you know, comparing yourself to others, your age or looking in the mirror to determine, do you look old? We actually are getting rather sophisticated on different clocks, aging clocks. We've got Horvath, Steve Horvath out of ucla world expert, has got the grim age clock that he can determine rather accurately what age you will die at according to your cells, how old your cells think they are. So the biologic age of your cells. So all of the cells have a different methylated state of being that they are telling us how old they think you are. We can also measure the telomeres. The telomeres are more like the end of the shoelace, the plastic on the shoelace. You know, how you have to string your. Your shoes. You got to get that through that little hole. Well, as the telomeres age, they start to fray and that comes undone, and then eventually they're not able to replicate. And that's on every cell of your body. So those are the two big ones. We have a couple other measurements as well. So the biologic clocks, these are. They're very interesting. They're not agreed upon, and there's a lot of controversy. I'll just say that they are measuring DNA methylation. So that. What is that? That is a detoxification process on the cells. And it is showing if you have a high methylated rate, it is a higher. You're older, your cells think that they are older. If you have a younger methylated rate, you. Your cells think that they are younger. And so there are different algorithms that you can plug in. So there's now a race for the clock to see who has the best clock. They are very accurate when you're looking at certain aspects of them. But you have to understand what the clock is measuring because you can really. You can game the system here. For instance, Dr. Horvath's clock is the grim age clock. It can predict when you die. A lot of people don't want to know that, but you can manipulate that as well. Meaning it could be very motivating if it says you're going to die in five years. Right. Better than the clocks is really on a functional analysis of how are you performing VO2 max, which is your forced expiratory volume of oxygen under exercise. It's measuring your heart rate and how much oxygen is coming out. So how much oxygen does your body absorb? How much carbon dioxide is coming out of your body really gives the best predictor of longevity because it is a functional analysis of what you're doing. There's an easy Sitting to rising test of going down to the floor without using your hands and getting up from the floor without using your hands and, and without losing your balance. That is predictive of a longevity component, which is a really nice functional analysis. You can do this in your living room. Do it if you have some wobbliness. Do it with some friends or family around to maybe catch you if you're gonna fall. But that sitting to raising test is a great one. There is also looking at the brain. I know a lot of my patients are concerned. They've seen their parents go through dementia or Alzheimer's. They're worried about their brains. We can get a functional analysis called an evoked action potential P300 of your reaction time. This is something that we've put in on an annual basis for our patients to respond to and test what is the reaction time of the brain? Because you can pick up any early cognitive declines in reading, the eeg, the electrical activity of the brain. The component is we want to get you on the road to Wellville. We want to measure it, we want to show that you've got traction and then ultimately you are feeling different in your body. Of course it also helps to have the labs and the functional testing because that can really show that we are making progress. And of course there's blood work and we want to look at the blood work. We want to look at optimal levels in the blood work. Hemoglobin A1C in particular is the three month window of your sugars. That's really looking at oxidative stress and damage from sugars and insulin on the body. Glucose, fasting glucose. We want that ideally around 80. That is an optimized individual. We want to look at your hormones and really optimize those for you. Senescent cells are formed by aging of the cells. Senescence, the root word of that is senex, which means old man. Hayflick and his research compatriots in 1961 dubbed these cells and they discovered they put cells in a petri dish and they were expecting them just to replicate forever given the right information. But what they discovered was they actually plateaued out and became senescence or they became old and they stopped replicating. But worse than that, they started signaling other CE to stop replicating as well. So this is called the Hayflick phenomenon, is that there's only so many generations that our cells can go through in cellular divisions. And then even worse, they then create a zombie class of cell in that they don't die, they just stick around in circulation. And signal others to go basically into the zombie state. What we can do about this and why it's come up now is we now have the technology and therapeutics that can really help clear these and turn them off. So from caloric restriction, which allows our body to go into autophagy, which is basically the garbage collection system of our body, gets activated when we don't have calories coming in. So the body in its innate wisdom is able to heal, but. But we have to give it a break. So that's the caloric restriction component. We can also filter the blood and, or add more oxygen in. So through eboo extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation technology E B O O and it hypersaturates the blood with oxygen. O3 One of those oxygen molecules goes and clears, turns off these senescent cells and then you have oxygen to feed the mitochondria again. Hyperbaric oxygen also is great for flooding the body with the oxygen, turning these cells off, decreasing the inflammatory cascade that gets stimulated by them and also clear them from circulation as well. I see so many people come to me that their providers are treating labs and they're manipulating the labs but they don't feel well. And ultimately we want you thriving. We want you connected. We want, we want full connection to your frontal lobe. So you're accessing the creativity and your heart and you're able to create what you want in this world. We want you energetic, overflowing, loving being. You notice the difference? That's how you know if it's working or not. Energy is the currency of life and without energy, so what creates energy in the body? Well, you need oxygen as a vital component to that. Oxygen is anti inflammatory and oxygen comes and can turn off that switch to turn off the cascade for inflammation.
