I have to warn you

This is going to be one of them thar scienticifical like articles.  If you are already jonsing for the “what is the pitch part”, it’s this: Take care of your telomeres!  I make a wonderful telomere centric supplement crafted by the deep research I’ve done over the past decade.

Ok onto the science.

There are lots of so called oncogenes out there.  If you want the precise definition of oncogene it’s actually very imprecise.  It goes like this, “a gene that sometimes under certain circumstances can transform a regular cell into a cancer cell.” If you see some weasel words in there then you might wonder how an entire theory of cancer- one that has now cost us 2 trillion dollars- has evolved into the central paradigm for looking at the dreaded disease. You might wonder how we could spend so much money to “win the war on cancer” over the past 4 decades and still not have had any significant effect on death from cancer. You might wonder at the slippery slope phenomenon that seems to permeate all of medicine these days.

What is that you ask?  Well it is when a previously accepted value that was a standard slips in one direction or another to accommodate certain agendas.  What those agendas are I will leave you to decide. But examples are cholesterol going from 220 to 180 (more statin drugs anyone?), blood sugar going from 120 to 90 (more diabetes drugs anyone?) and of course 5 year cancer survival being rearranged to fit cancers that have a 4 month survival. If you get these poor souls to live 8 to 12 months you’ve “won” the war on cancer and can justify your next big money making drug.

If you aren’t winning the game just change the rules.

After all all we need is more money to solve this problem right? Guess whose money they are spending!

Ok off the soap box with a reminder: take care of your telomeres or at least “support them”.

Back to oncogenes. One famous oncogene is called Myc pronounced more like the derogatory term for an Irishman but I prefer to say it “mice” since so many of our cancer models are in mice!

Myc is one of those genes that have been mutated manipulated knocked in singly doubly or more and amplified in all sorts of ways to generate mouse and other models of cancer.  It is one of the prototypical oncogenes or drivers of cancerous transformation.

Now remember recent brilliant minds

Have deemed cancer a “random bad luck event that defies prevention”. Those same people publicly state that we should work even harder to prevent cancer especially with life style and environmental changes. Then they say quit smoking.  Duh! What about the rest of it especially the environmental part.  It all stops short there perhaps because one would have to implicate several of the very same revenue generators that float our economy including Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Oil and a whole host of other sanctioned abominations that shall remain  unnamed because I am already enough of a target of said “Bigness”.

Reminder short telomeres are a risk factor for cancer- just sayin’!

A recent article linked mutated or amplified telomerase as a driver of the driver oncogene Myc.

Remember this is all random.  It couldn’t be possible that cancer “has a plan” called cell survival that dates back 500 million years now could it? Back then cells behaved like single entities in a sea of primordial competition.  They thrived on simple sugars, loved acid environments and grew like weeds.

Sound familiar? Sound like hallmarks of cancer?  Of course not it’s just bad luck and we need more money and more drugs!

According to our brilliant scientists cancer just randomly mutates all the right genes and some of the wrong ones to create an out of control cell mass that eats its host to death and kills itself in the process.

According to a recent PBS special half of us will get cancer by 2050 and it’s way too smart for us to cure. We can however make small slow progress against the “Emperor of All Maladies”. Talk about pre-conditioning an audience!

Did I mention that short telomeres are a risk factor for cancer?

In the scenario of telomerase driving the Myc oncogene to higher and higher levels of expression, there is a complete loss of control of cellular replication. Telomerase does this. But wait! Somehow you have to mutate both telomerase and Myc in a coordinated fashion.

This coordination is random and happens enough times that by 2050 half of us will have cancer.

This makes perfect sense to me. Not!

I ain’t buyin’ it.  I have said many times I think we are barking up the wrong tree for the wrong reasons.

I am frankly not allowed to say more anymore.

I can say this

I make a wonderful little telomere support pack.

You can find it here.

The rest is up to you, your doctor, the FDA, the FTC, the AMA, the NCI, the EPA and god knows who else that controls your thoughts and your future and of course your money.

Me?  I ain’t buyin’ what they are selling!

Doc

PS for the record I am not stating implying or otherwise insinuation that I can do anything to cancer or my supplements can do anything for cancer prevention or treatment. Just to be clear because there are a lot of people out there who want to protect you from people like me!

At no time in my long medical career have I seen so varied and disjointed an approach to science.

In fact traditional science has failed the public perception. People are sick and tired of being sick and tired. They are tired of long waits, nonsensical answers and a pedantic paternal medial system that promises new cures and miracle events that never materialize.

They are tired of taking drugs, dealing with dangerous and deadly side effects and constant negative approaches and campaigns against natural agents.

Remember all we need is more money. The 2+ trillion dollars in cancer research and the 1+ trillion dollars in diabetes and heart disease have not cured anything.

We now stand on the cusp of “genetic cures”. Let’s look at those for a second. Melanoma gene therapy is applicable to 18% of people with melanoma.  Is that enough? Cystic Fibrosis cures now reach 5% of people. Is that enough?

And while you are pondering this question be reminded that the “cures” are now measured in months, not years or decades- at least not yet.

Researchers will tell you that many genes can lead to the same or similar diseases. They will tell you that such diseases are actually several very different diseases. They will not tell you that all cancers have a component of defective respiration ala Otto Warburg. Warburg won the Nobel Prize in the late 1920’s for his work in the field. His choices over the next 30 years of his life wound up getting him discredited as a scientist – until recently.

Progress can be slowed but not stopped.

Right now a company called BioViva has injected the AAV9 vector to deliver telomerase into a human being and have had some great success with the process, all testing is showing a significant increase in median telomere length. 

My friend Mike Fossel and his company Telocyte are working on curing Alzheimer Disease with the AAV9 telomerase vector as well through an FDA trial.  The FDA trial will take years of course but it will shut up the naysayers once and for all. By the way Mike’s Book “The Telomerase Revolution” is available from Amazon right now.  Get a copy and learn from one of the true gurus in the field.

Right now there is a backlash in the scientific community against such therapies.  The BioViva thing has caused all kinds of ethicists to yell “cease and desist human testing”. Sorry gang this IS HAPPENING and it is happening right now. Not 50 years from now , but RIGHT NOW!

If it fails (and it certainly doesn’t look like it will with the data we have so far) it will answer more questions than any other trial has ever answered about aging and anti-aging therapies.  The ethicists say it’s a big deal if it fails because it involves a human being.  They are right but this person was 100% informed and is a volunteer.  Read that again please a VOLUNTEER. Also understand that I have personally guinea pigged it for a bunch of different stem cell therapies and would have allowed the AAV9 to be trialed on me in a heart beat.

If it succeeds it will also answer more questions than any other trial in history. People have sacrificed their lives and health for far stupider things than this.  I applaud this effort and look forward to the final results whatever they may be.

Why would I be so adamant?  How could an MD feel this way?

Here is the problem.  No one has another 2 trillion dollars to waste.  Science has had decades to do things their own way and failed miserably.  The trumpets are blaring about new discoveries but mark my words these trumpets will sound flat notes.  No one will hear them over the next round of trumpets however.  NO one will admit. “WE screwed up!”  They will just keep saying they need more money and painting a bleak picture of the heroic struggle against diseases that are smarter than mankind.

They will continue to say things like Cancer expresses telomerase so expressing telomerase can cause cancer.  The short answer to this is: morons.

Or my personal favorite: Elephants over express the tumor suppressor gene P53 so they live a long time without cancer. Elephants live 60 to 70 years a full decade short of the current human life span at least.

Most cancers in humans occur after age 70 and continue to rise after that.  Find me a 75 year old elephant in the wild not the zoo which is where these miracle elephants were studied, and maybe I will believe you.

Remember I was part of this problem for almost 2 decades!

But we can all take comfort. No one can stop the wheels of progress forever*

Doc

*There is one more thing I would love to see.  When the BioViva study proves safe and effective I would love for all the people screaming foul to say, “We were wrong!”  I say it when I am wrong and have on more than one occasion publicly.  But if recent history is any indication, people will simply continue trying to obstruct progress, waste money and not even blink when the facts smack them upside the head. Don’t be on the tail end of this – invest in your health and well being NOW.

I might be splitting hairs here

But I think its important to understand the difference between Longevity and Life Extension. We can throw both topics under the bus of “Anti-Aging and or Regenerative Medicine”. I suppose we could also call them part of Functional Medicine because try as I might I have not really been able to distinguish the differences in the mission statements of all of the above other than the existence of different certifying bodies and conference machines that rake in a ton of money for any one of them.

That said I DO distinguish between Longevity and Life Extension as concepts (not companies!).

To me Longevity is living as long as one can within the current understanding and parameters of our genetics and far more importantly, our epigenetics.

The Grand Dame of Longevity has to be Madam Jeanne Calment who holds the longevity record of 122 years at her death. Her life also bears a little bit of looking at but understand that there is truly not all that much to be learned from people who are either their own personal blue zones or those who live in them.

Madam Calment smoked cigarettes and cigars until age 117. She also drank wine daily (The French Paradox?). But she did neither in excess. As a matter of fact, if you look at our own government’s unofficial statements smoking less than 5 cigarettes a day or less than 2 cigars a day is probably not affecting one’s health. I would not recommend it since one does not know one’s own epigenetic response to these toxins and why tempt fate but those are the facts. Madam Calment’s wine consumption was well within the recommended dose and if you look at studies there is suggestion that people who drink some small amounts of alcohol daily actually live longer than tee totalers.

Again, make your own conclusions- I do not smoke or drink on a regular basis personally.

Madam Calment also road her bike daily past 110 years so she would be considered physically active. She was also short at 4’11” but this may not have been short for her time. So far there is not a correlation between height and longevity unless short stature is caused by poor nutrition early in life and the womb.

There were not stem cell assays or telomere measurements around when Madam Calment died but she did have a few CT scans of the brain in her last decade. The results showed brain atrophy consistent with a normal 80-90-year-old. Reportedly she remained mentally intact for her entire life.

This brings up an important fact: The super centenarians (people who live past 110) die of the same things people in their 70’s and 80’s do- they just do it a few decades later.
In addition try as they might researchers have not found “longevity genes” active in these people.

Popular candidates for longevity genes include the Sirtuins, Klotho, Foxo, and a whole host of others.

So far there is no definitive evidence that these genes confer longer lives in humans

But the research continues at least for the last 3. The sirtuins have pretty much been relegated to metabolic gate guardians after the failure of GSK to make any of David Sinclair’s magic molecules work in people.

That brings us to Longevity versus Life Extension

I am not 100% sure the pathway to one leads to the other. I can recall Dr. Lenhard Hayflick the unwilling father of anti-aging medicine and the originator of the Hayflick Limit (at least in theory- the fruit fly scientist Michael Rose claims in his book he originated the term for Hayflick’s findings) making the following statement about the current machinations of science and aging (this includes Mtor inhibition, calorie restriction, resveratrol, sirtuins, klotho, Foxo, Hif-1a and others).

He said, “All you are doing is finding the natural maximum life span of the organism when it is subjected to the most perfect conditions you can create.”

That is longevity but not life extension. That is Jeanne Calment, not the singularity!

Now before we make that sound trivial

It’s not, it’s hugely important. Many people think that to achieve Life Extension you have to have achieved longevity. That may sound obvious but consider this.

Maria Blasco’s experiments in mice with 10X telomerase over extension took typical animals (remember all of the above candidates have only animal data so far.) and added 25% to their lives and old animals and extended their lives by 13%. This was BEYOND the known natural life spans of these animals and, it happened in a majority of them not just a few as in calorie restriction (unless you count fruit flies!).

It is my assumption that in order to do that you have to fix all the other stuff including DNA repair, protein misfolding, metabolic aberrations and mitochondrial uncoupling and epigenetic switches towards inflammation and genome wide demethylation or you would have at the very least sick old animals. Frankly I don’t see how they could survive and live healthier than the controls if all that stuff were not fixed to a degree.  This suggests that their may be a more direct path to longevity that actually goes through life extension rather than the other way around!

All in all, longevity is a great goal. So is Life Extension.

But both only become meaningful with a Health Span that matches them.

Stay lean, eat a bit less, exercise regularly, get good regular sleep, don’t sweat the small stuff and find productive ways to deal with the big stuff.

And take meaningful doses of fish oil, not the doses used in meta-analysis!

 

Dr. Dave