Ageing is a treatable disease | Nir Bazilai | TEDxBeaconStreetSalon

[Music] you should know that people most people who wear skirts leave three years longer than people who don't leave skirt now truly this statistic includes women okay but this is huge guys lifespan that is three years longer you know in mind in my community when they ask you know why husbands died before their wives the answer is because they want to okay that's another TED talk thank you so much but I'm here not to talk about science fiction in fact just to update you about science now and you know you can look and I've looked throughout this day by the way people have aged earlier I see and left but I looked throughout the day at this auditorium and I was asking and I'm a physician I was asking who here has hypertension who here has diabetes who here has high cholesterol and I wouldn't be doing a good guess but if I ask who's here over the age of 50 or who's below age of 50 you all of us will do a pretty good job and the point is that aging has a biology and this biology can be targeted we can delay aging we can stop aging we can reverse aging in several instances and this is what I want to talk with you about today and also to make sure that you understand that there are benefits from that but before the benefits let me make several points the first is that aging is the risk factor for most of those diseases that we are afraid of from cancer from art from Alzheimer from diabetes now you'll tell me now just a minute cholesterol is the biggest risk factor for heart cholesterol is a three-fold risk factor for heart but death from heart disease is tau sometimes higher when we age this is the major risk factor for heart and aging is the major risk factor for Alzheimer's diabetes in in cancer and the point here is that aging or the biology of aging to drive those diseases so we need to stop the aging part in order to prevent all those diseases what's happening now is terrible because if you look at accumulation of three diseases okay we're talking about multiple diseases and this graph shows accumulation of three diseases in men and women on the Left it's not much when we're young and after age of 60 it takes off it goes from zero to 230 so people have three diseases each disease might be terrible each disease has a treatment that has side effects and then you have three treatments that all are interacting with each other we cannot go on and live like that and there is a clear alternative for that what we need to do is start targeting aging so that we can actually drop down this accelerated rate of getting a disease how are we going to do that well first of all the question is is it worthwhile doing that is there an example that will make you think that maybe it's worthwhile doing here is the Khan family because the cont family is the poster child of one of my studies that his studies on centenarians and you see the counseling they are all born between 1910 and 1920 to to a parents and what's unique about them is each one of them got to be older than hundred and two Helen who's sitting in the left that died at age 110 I met her which when she was 100 years old in fact she opened the door to me smoking a cigarette and I'm looking at her and saying excuse me none of your doctor told you to stop smoking and she looks back at me and says you know all four doctors that told me to stop smoking they died and I think she's making a very important point point one is if you smoke for 90 years you can leave for a long life okay but but really the point here is that those guys were resistance or or we're resilience to some of the insults that we know will kill each one of it all of us and by the way I have more than seven hundred centenarians and half of them are overweight or obese half of them are smokers less than half do exercise like even walking or bicycling only two percent are vegetarian they got to this age in in spite of the environment certainly not telling each every one of you that the secret for longevity is to be obese and smoked and anything like that as I said I have over 750 nares we actually have 3,000 people because we have the offspring of centenarians too and we learned really a lot about them in fact we found longevity genes that have been translated into treatment by major pharmaceuticals so this is a really good Avenue of understanding them but I'll ask you do you what do you want your family to be a family like that but first I have to convince you something that I found out people do not understand intuitively the question is did they get sick when everybody else gets sick got sick and now they leave 30 years longer but they are sick or did their longevity and health span go together in other words did they age slower or did they just happen to survive this is the answer so what you see here is a different graph than before you see on the left side which is the disease-free side the one represent all of them are healthy now the Green Line is our control population and the blue line is our centenarians so let's look at the at the green line you see that people are healthy and kind of after the age of 60 they start to have diseases at age 80 less than 10% they don't have any disease but look at the same thing Ariane's they get disease later on in fact they opened 20 30 years of disease free time and even after the age of hundred almost 30% of them don't have a disease they die one day so their health span and lifespan is going together is going together and that's why when you talk to the Khan family we're a hundred years old they're all having fun because they are healthy okay so they can do anything if you are healthy but this is for me not the major discovery the major discovery here is not only they lived longer but they are sick for very little time at the end of their life we called it contraction of morbidity so if all of us are sick five years at the end of their life they are sick less than five months at there they at the end of their lives it's interesting that it's not only in my study the CDC the central of Disease Control is doing lots of interesting calculation in this case they were looking at the medical cost in the last two years of life of somebody who dies after 100 or at age 70 so to die at age 100 is third the cost of somebody who dies when they are 70 this led to this calculation of what happened if we have increased health span and contraction of morbidity it's a seven trillion save for the economy we called it longevity dividend and this is actually the point that we're trying and I'm going all over the world to teach to really tell politicians that we cannot afford not to do it when we are increasing health span by decreasing all diseases not only one we're doing a major save for the economy so how do we do it what knowledge do we have a where we can start making progress we created this whole field that's called geroscience it's kind of interesting that the science on old people is really new what we've achieved in geroscience we have identified hallmarks of aging that can be targets for therapy there are eight hallmarks of aging that we found and actually each one of those hallmarks has a target that a biotech company is trying to develop drugs to but the most important thing about those hallmarks are they're interactive so for example in the bottom you see proto studies so our cells are failing to do garbage disposal we start accumulating lots of garbage we can correct this by genetic manipulation we can also correct it now with a drug and when we do that it's not only that we self we solve Proteus disease but this affects the metabolic dysregulation that we have with aging inflammation mitochondrial a problem so it effects other parts of the hallmarks and I have many more examples like that I think each one of the hallmarks can be a TEDTalk or on its own how did we get there well we did something kind of clever instead of just understanding the Aging that sounds some so complex we created and found by accident or by design models that live longer by looking at models that live longer we understood some of what's going on in aging even if we didn't understand the whole of Aging and we started creating a whole industry of science and biotechs that will target those and I will summarize what we achieved in those two sentences first of all healthy health span and life span and health span is really my goal I have to tell you in this advertisement for a drug that delay aging I would put the lifespan as a side-effect okay yeah you know you can leave you can live without diseases and stuff like that but I'm sorry you might live longer I don't know if you're ready for that I don't know if your economy will allow that but this is a side effect but the point is hell spam has been extended in numerous models and it was done by a manipulation with the environment and with drugs and with genetic ways not only that and that's the second point some of those drugs are in humans use except they're not purpose for targeting aging so how do we make a progress what are the challenges in order to build to bring these discoveries and start getting to delay aging right now this is our problem if you have hypertension or if we want to treat diabetes so if we want to treat any one of the other diseases there's biological discoveries and biotechs are formed maybe the pharmaceuticals are then charging too much money but there is a drug that's being developed and eventually will get cheaper okay and that's how we do it all the time we have a major problem that FDA doesn't recognize aging as a preventive disease or as we say doesn't have an indication if aging is not recognized as a preventable disease two things are going to happen first of all the healthcare providers don't have to pay the customers they should if they do the economy but they don't have to but more important the pharmaceuticals are not going to jump in where you don't have an economical plan so one of our obstacles now is to actually get the FDA to approve aging as a preventable condition how are we doing it well we're a bunch of scientists that created this study that's called tame tame stands for targeting aging with limits forming but Foreman is a common drug to treat type 2 diabetes and it's a generic and cheap drug in fact metformin is the cheapest drug in a formula in the United States still 10 times more expensive than in Canada but it's really cheap why metformin well when you give meat form into variety of animals they will live longer and healthier and there's a lot of biology in fact metformin hits most of the hallmarks of aging whether primary or secondary but also there are lots of clinical study that shows that metformin prevent type 2 diabetes it prevents heart disease in diabetic it's associated with less cancers in diabetes its delays cognitive decline in alzheimer patient or MCI patient it even has lower mortality people on metformin with diabetes die significantly less than people without diabetes even if they have diabetes and there are more obese and they have more disease to start with metformin prevents this mortality so there's a lot of data clinical data to support that metformin is a drug that we can repurpose for aging so what we're trying to do is two things use metformin as a tool and I'm saying it like that because it's a tool in order to show that aging can be targeted even more important use it so the FDA will have an indication to delay aging and we've talked with the FDA and we have a way to proceed we hope to start the trial very soon let me make two closing remarks and it has to do a little bit about the future also if aliens were landing in Boston who here has pets raise your hands yeah I thought the people who were who had pets left already or didn't come but more than half year have pets so I think if aliens will come to Boston and I friends with dogs in Boston the first thing that they will try to figure out is who's running this world the dog or the man right because the dogs are pulling the the man who was scooping the poops you know it'll take us take them 24 but I think more important they will look around and say you didn't take care of Aging what's the matter with you you didn't stop aging because remember those people who come here came from farther than Mars they already discovered what to do with it because if we go to Mars and we don't have something that really targets the process of Aging we'll get cancer heart disease by the time we're there and we're never going to come back so we need this for this reason but that's not the only reason we need those drugs now in this hospital there people are surviving cancer that got immune therapy chemotherapy those drugs are aging those people those kids after cancer aging rapidly and everybody after severe chemotherapy and radiotherapy is aging rapidly we need to help them people with HIV get diseases 10 years before they should according to age disabled people who cannot move and then they eat more so they create other problem that accelerates aging or poor people that for variety of reason cannot get into medical as I said metformin is a really cheap drug to give to people to prevent all those diseases that are risky when you're poor so we are not talking only about how to make your family you help your family but we're talking about other needs that when you target aging are very important and I do want to make another point it will sound more futuristic than it is and I'm not talking about science fiction in anything that I said so far but think of it this way you can take a sperm of a 70 year old man and fertilize the egg of a 50 year old woman and the baby will be formed or what we see is this blastocyte that is being formed and dividing and guess what those cells do not remember the age of the parents they erase everything and starts at zero we already in this situation created this erasing of aging and this idea of doing it is already happening in the labs so the future is about really improving the Delaine aging to the extent that will be healthy that we won't have to take care of our parents but their parents will take care of us and our children there is no science fiction here this is science now it's accelerating very rapidly and I really hope that your aging will be real real fun thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 61,403

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Genetics, Life, Life Development, Life Hack

Id: XN7rLbCBO1c

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020