Look and Feel Decades Younger by Removing Senescent Cells, with Dr. Jerry Mixon

I moved all of my hormones— thyroid, growth hormone, pregnenolone, progesterone, dehydroepiandrosterone, testosterone, estradiol— all of them back to the mid-range of a healthy 25-year-old and measured every 3 months and tweaked and adjusted and put that together with a diet and exercise. And I started losing weight and I started getting stronger. I'm basically 79. I currently carry a senescent cell load of a man in his mid-50s. My target is 20s.

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Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubow, and Ed Levitan is with us today. And today we have Dr. Gerry Mixon. He is a physician with over 50 years of medical experience, and he's also the founder of the Longevity Medical Clinic, where he has helped thousands of patients reject normal aging since 1997. He's 78 years old, although you wouldn't know it by looking at him, and he runs 3 miles a day. He maintains a lean, athletic body Proving that getting stronger, faster, and leaner, and sharper with age is not just possible, it's the standard that his patients live by. Gerry, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

Well, thank you.

First off, please tell the listeners, what are senescent cells? So that they're— we're all on the same page.

Every cell in our body is designed to do a particular job for a particular period of time, at which point it runs to the end of its lifespan, and it's supposed to die. We call it autophagy. That is self-eating. It's supposed to die and fall apart and be replaced by a new cell. But a small percentage of cells hit that endpoint, and instead of dying, they basically become cellular zombies. They stop doing what they're supposed to do. They start kicking out anti-growth, anti-healing, anti-repair chemicals into their environment. And they become the living dead of the cellular world. The problem is those anti-growth, anti-healing chemicals that they kick out poison healthy cells and turn them into these cellular zombies. And so as we age, we start accumulating these. And the scary part is that The second most susceptible tissue in our body that develops senescence is our immune system. The CD4, CD8 cells that are responsible for finding and killing viruses and cancers and all the bad stuff that try to, to take us off of this world. By the time we are in our 70s to 80s, the majority of our immune cells are now senile. And actually are interfering with healing and repair. So, and we now know why, by the way, as we age, our hormone balances are dropping. Every gland in our body, your testicles, your ovaries, adrenals, thyroid, pituitary, every gland in our body is being invaded by these senescent cells and being poisoned. And as that senescent cell accumulates in our glandular tissues, our hormone levels are declining. The fascinating question that we don't have an answer to yet is if we reduce senescent cell load in younger people in their 30s and early 40s, when we're first seeing that decline, if we wiped out their senescent cell load then, Would their hormones all turn back on? Women and men. Would we be able to avoid hormone replacement therapy for the rest of their lives? Great question. I just don't have the answer yet, but we're working on it.

So has— have you— are there ways that you are helping the body clear the senescent cells out?

Yes. Yeah.

Can you talk about that?

Sure. The most, quote, natural, non-pharmaceutical is simply weight loss and muscle mass. Working muscle produces over 600 peptides, enzymes, hormones, growth factors that actually kill senescent cells. And so someone who maximizes working muscle mass will be able to reduce their senescent cell load by up to 40%. So that's a big help. Also, fat produces over 50 compounds that promote senescence in our tissues. And that's one of the reasons I made it a point to lower my body fat level as low as I reasonably can and kick my muscle mass up because I want to make as few senescent cells as possible and kill them in the most natural ways possible. But we've also got medications.

I wanna make sure we talk about fasting 'cause fasting does a good job with that.

It does too. Sure. Intermittent fasting. Yeah. And, you know, what your intermittent is, is whether it's monthly, weekly, or daily is a point of still research and observation. You know, there's a lot of people still looking at this. My personal is I eat twice a day. I have a nice robust breakfast and then I go out and do about 3 miles on the trail and then I clean up and come to work and then I eat a good lunch. But then that's the last time I eat till the next morning. And so I have a daily fast, if you will. And so that for me, that's the most comfortable. Yeah.

You clean up pretty well, Jerry.

Well, thank you, ma'am. Thank you.

Okay, so we've got fasting, we've got muscle growth. Out of curiosity, and you can tell me to pound sand if you don't want to talk about this, but, uh, are you using anything to help your body decrease its body fat, such as a peptide, such as an injectable peptide?

I have not. Um, I use it in my patients, but 11% body fat is about as low as I really feel like going anyway. You know, I'm not trying to get down to bodybuilder sort of levels where you see every vein and every muscle fiber. You know, if I can see my abdominal muscles, I'm lean enough.

Yeah. Yeah. Were you always lean like that, or?

Oh God, no, no, no, no, no. At 50, I was round. I wish I, I could show you a picture on this. No, at 50, I was round. I was fat. I was depressed. I was damn near sexless. I could not have run around the block if my life depended on it.

So what shifted?

Um, I started into this whole hormone replacement milieu. I started looking at what could be done about the aging process. The original studies were done with 2 compounds, a, a drug that was initially approved for chronic myelogenous leukemia Dasatinib and a polyphenol over-the-counter supplement, quercetin. So 100 milligrams of dasatinib with 1,200 or so milligrams of quercetin was a combination that they used in the original studies done by Mayo Clinic. And so I basically just swiped Mayo Clinic's protocol from their early studies, and that's what I used. I figured if it's good enough for Mayo, it's good enough for me. Um, now they have modified their protocol several times since then, uh, because they're trying to get as little risk as possible balanced against some improvement. The problem that Mayo— and in fact every research clinic on the planet has had— is they're judging based on very crude criteria. How fast do the mice run mazes? How— with the humans, how many sit-stands can they do? How far can they walk in 6 minutes? Okay, uh, these are pretty crude clinical measurements. The thing I want to know is, how low did you actually drop your senescent cell load compared to where you started, and what particular physical, mental changes did that level give you?

And how do you measure that?

Well, no one has measured it until now.

Can you measure the level of senescent cells? Like, truly?

I just spent $200,000 getting a transitional laboratory to develop a test for me that lets me measure the senescent cell load, the CD8 TMRUs in your blood, to tell me what percentage of your, of your immune system has now become senescent. Okay, um, and so yes, I've had mine measured. I have— all my doctors are getting it measured. I have 10 physicians who work for me, um, and we are just starting this week measuring patients. Uh, so yes, we can now measure the senescent cell load. Then we can treat you and measure you again to see where it is, treat you some more, measure it again, and move down. And so I re— I moved all of my hormones, you know, uh, thyroid, growth hormone, uh, pregnenolone, progesterone, dehydroepiandrosterone, testosterone, estradiol, uh, all of them back to the mid-range of a healthy 25-year-old and measured every 3 months and tweaked and adjusted and put that together with a diet And exercise. And I started losing weight and I started getting stronger. I'm basically 79. I currently carry a senescent cell load of a man in his mid-50s. My target is 20s.

And I have 2 questions based on what you just said. When you were— I mean, you couldn't measure this when you were 50, but you obviously feel better and are way healthier than when you were 50. Do you speculate at all what your levels were when you were 50? Because they were probably more like a 79-year-old.

Yes, they probably were. You know, the things that cause senescent cell load are body fat. The fatter you are, the faster you accumulate them. A sedentary lifestyle. The less muscle mass you got. This, this, um, progressive age-related decline in muscle mass is putting us at higher and higher rates of accumulation as we age. Sure.

Is the senescent cell test widely available, or is it only in your clinic?

Right now, I have the only clinic in the country that can do the test. Um, I would love to make it widely available, but right now it is classed as an experimental in-house protocol. Yeah, um, I am talking to the regulatory folks And, you know, if we get enough experience with it, you know, let me try it on, you know, 600 or 800 people over the course of the next year or 2 and, uh, get it refined and then come up with a, with a normative value. I mean, the most important value we've got right now is what are people's senescent cell load when they come into the clinic and get their first test before therapy. at different ages. Because there is no international really standard for that. You know, everybody that's done this sort of research, it's been done in different countries, in different laboratories with different reagents and different equipment. And so the scatter plot for the normative values are all over the map.

Right.

And so by doing it consistently in one lab, one set of equipment, one set of reagents, you know, I should get a much better normative value for older people. And I'm also running it on much of my support staff, my, you know, young people in their 20s and 30s at the front desk. And I also have a little, uh, uh, beauty department, you know, where they, they do Botox and laser therapies and so on. Those ladies are in their 20s. So I'm, I'm measuring every young person I can along with our older to try to develop a better curve so we know what normal is and we know where— what we're shooting for long term.

And are there— my second question is, are there any downsides or risks to the protocols that you're doing with your clients and your doctors?

I have 4 rules of medicine that I beat into all my doctors. First rule of medicine: Anything strong enough to help is strong enough to hurt. There is a downside to every decision we make in medicine. Your doctor's job is not to give you things that have no risks. They don't exist. All right? Your doctor's job is to try and give you as many benefits balanced against the lowest risks practical. And that's practical. Second rule, the proper dose of anything is just enough to do the job. Third rule, if you don't measure, you don't know, which is why I've spent so much money developing a test that will let me measure. Okay. And the fourth rule is the one I hate. You can do everything right and things can still go to hell.

Amen to that.

That's true, I think, for life, not just medicine. It is.

But as physicians, we bump again up, up We bump up against that too often. You know, you're following the protocols, you're doing it all right, and things still go wrong. What are you gonna do?

Yeah.

So yes, the medicines we use have side effects. Uh, so the dasatinib and quercetin— I've got several hundred people that have been put on that combination, and I've probably got 30 of them That simply do not tolerate the drug. Just don't. They get blinding headaches, or they're so fatigued they can't get out of bed the next day, or they got vomiting and diarrhea.

Is this a Herx reaction or a drug reaction or both?

Uh, I think it's a drug reaction. Um, so I'm interested in a different polyphenol from the quercetin. which is called fisetin. And fisetin in high doses, and I mean really high doses, 100 milligrams per kilogram of body mass on a mouse, does a great job of reducing their senescent cell load. The proper dose for humans has not yet been elucidated. And so one of my projects for the next several months is I wanna take my people that wanted dasatinib but didn't tolerate it, and I want to put them on high doses of quercetin for variable periods of time and then measure their senescent cell load before and after. Because if an over-the-counter polyphenol that doesn't require a prescription— because we, we really know of no serious side effects that it has yet— um, that would be preferable to using a cancer drug. But we don't know how well it works in people yet. We know it works really well in mice, but mice are tougher than us. It's hard to kill a rat. People, we're pretty fragile in comparison.

Do you ever ramp the Dasatinib up? Do you start, do you start at the 100 or do you start a lower dose and then ramp them up?

It depends. Um, I usually in the beginning I started exactly with the, the Mayo Clinic protocol. 100 milligrams for 3 days each week for 3 weeks, along with 1,200 of quercetin the same night. Um, and then if people did not tolerate that, I dropped it to 50 milligrams, but then I would do it for 5 days instead of 3 days with the lower dose. And more people tolerated that, but some people tolerate none at all. They simply have a— A strong reaction to the drug.

So hormone balance. I know one of your questions is, can testosterone injections backfire? That's a very interesting question for me because we do a decent amount of those.

Yeah.

And are we talking men, women, or both?

Mostly we do mostly men.

Oh, we do both.

We give women testosterone, but it's usually not necessarily injection. We'll give it in their cream or Things like that.

We use transdermal for both men and women for the vast majority of the time.

Okay.

We've got a few guys that want the injections. The injections, I, are not my favorite because you usually end up with this high peak level and then over the next week or two it declines and declines and I get this seesaw too high to too low. Um, with a transdermal cream, you know, by adjusting the amount of hormone in the cream, the amount of cream applied, the amount of surface area is applied to, and which surface area— thin vascular skin versus thick poorly vascularized skin— you have almost infinite ability to adjust your blood levels. So we try to do a peak draw about 2 hours after application of the cream, and then we can raise and lower doses quickly and easily. Uh, so we're, we're not kind of stuck to 3 or 4 months with the pellets or a couple of weeks with the shots. You know, if someone calls us and they've got an issue, we can adjust it right like that.

That makes sense.

So, and by the way, you asked about women. If you haven't read it yet, look up, um, Glazier in Ohio. Christine Glazer and Dr. Donovitz out of Atlanta. Between them, they've got 2,700, 2,800 women that have been on testosterone supplementation for 15 years. And the women that have consistently used their testosterone— and they, by the way, use pellets, they get a higher dose than I normally carry women. But they cut their breast cancer incidence by 85%.

Wow.

Which I think is just fabulous. Yeah. So we don't carry our women with that much testosterone. We try to keep them closer to a 25 to 30-year-old woman level. But even there, we have very rare cases of breast cancer in our clinic. Restoring your hormone balance to a 25-year-old range. You know, we call these sex hormones and they are in adolescence when we're preparing ourselves for reproduction. But once you're an adult, these are primarily brain hormones. These alter how we think about ourselves and the world around us, how we perceive the universe in total. You know, once you have the endocrine support of a young person, your brain works differently. The drive, the ambition, the self-confidence, the stress tolerance all improves.

So how do you distinguish, you know, when we get our Quest Labs for all of the things you're listing off, they don't give us the healthy 25-year-old range necessarily. They just give us, are you dying? Or are you too high? Are you dying because it's too low? Are you too— that they don't, they don't really suss it out. So how did you get to what's a 25-year-old healthy, healthy level look like?

Well, basically that, uh, that data was in the internet back in those days. You just had to find it one paper at a time. So it took some doing, but actually the labs, the big labs all have age-normed values. You know, the fact is, if you're 60 and you ask for your dehydroepiandrosterone level, they'll give you the normative ranges for your age. If you're 25, they give it to you for your age. And so they've got it. You just have to get it.

How'd you pick 25? Like, why 25 and not 20 or not 30? Why there?

We age at different different rates. Speed of processing peaks in our late teens, sixteen, seventeen years old. That's why you watch the kids on their phone and their thumbs are flying along a thousand miles an hour, and people our age are going duh duh duh. You know, physical power. Peaks at about 25. And by 30, we've lost 1 to 1.5% of our physical power. The decline has already begun by 30. It's just not grossly noticeable by then. But every decade, the rate of decline picks up and gets faster and faster and faster till by time you pass 70 or so, you're headed downhill at a furious rate. So On the other hand, executive function doesn't peak till you're around 50. The ability to hand judgment and ability to, to juggle conflicting sorts of data, it takes a degree of maturity that we don't have when we're young. So my idea was I want to give my patients back as close to their physical peak as possible. Life has given them the experience. And I deal with a lot of business owners and executives. And so what I tell them is, if you can give back someone with 25 or 30 years experience in a field the drive, the ambition, the self-confidence that they had in their youth, and the physical capacity for work, they're not going to be beaten by some young, young kid coming up. Nobody beats that person, okay? Because they've got it all. So that's basically how I put it, put it all together.

Do women get road ragey when you get them to the 25-year-old level? I'm just curious.

No, they get husband agey.

That's right.

I think I look at what they did when they were young, women and men. You know, mostly the wives are worried, well, if you raise his testosterone, is he going to become a raging beast or something? And I say, look, if your husband at 25 was a well-socialized, nice guy, he will still be a well-socialized, nice guy when I put him back to that level. If he was an antisocial bar fighter, you know, son of a bitch, I don't want to put him back there. I'll raise it from where he is at 60, but we're going to take it up very slowly, and you, Mrs., are responsible for telling me when it's enough.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Amazing.

With women, I have a little different test. When you were a— the week or 10 days before your menstrual Period. Were you a sweet and loving woman, or were you a PMSing bitch?

You don't say that. Please tell me you don't say that to them.

I asked her husband, was she or wasn't she? But that's— the reality is that one of the problems with menopause is it is a long-term version of your PMS situation. You know, it was that profound drop in progesterone. Progesterone makes you mellow and relaxed, and, you know, you go with the flow with high progesterone. When you drop that progesterone rapidly, that's when PMS happens. Okay? And you've got the same effect at menopause. You've only dropped your estrogen about 50% when your period stops, but you've dropped your progesterone by 65 to 70%. And your testosterone by 80%. Okay, and so it's that, that profound drop in progesterone that results in the menstruation stopping. And so if you did not handle low progesterone in your youth, you're probably going to have a lot more PMS symptoms during menopause. And women that did well with their cycle in their youth tend to Just go right through menopause with no problem at all. But the reason for asking that is those women, we never let their progesterone drop that low. We keep them a peak, a valley, but the valley doesn't go low enough to get the mood swings. So even in their 50s and 60s and 70s, we maintain enough progesterone level To keep them mellow and relaxed and content with life.

All right, this is—I mean, this is fascinating. Thank you. Like, this has been awesome. I think this is probably where we need to cut it, just from the listen length. But this has been—you know—I love the senescent cell conversation and all about the how do you age well? So that's really well done. So, so on behalf of me and Ed and all the listeners. Gerald, let me say thank you for joining us for this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Can you please tell people how to find you?

Sure.

We'll put, we'll put it in the show notes. And I see you have a book behind you. So anything you want to say, we'll put it in the show notes.

All right. Well, there is a book, Lifelong, okay? Stronger, Faster, Leaner, Smarter, Sexier at Any Age. Okay. If they want to get to Our website, it's lmclinic.com. So that stands for longevitymedicalclinic.com. lmclinic.com. I got a lot of videos. I do a 4-hour radio show. We video those so you can actually, you know, watch it, stream it anytime you want to.

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