Many of you might not know this, but I lost my mom to cancer when I was just over one year old. That experience shaped my go getter life philosophy and inspired me to live life to the fullest. Now that I am a mom of three and considered a geriatric one at that, I am even more obsessed with aging well and staying healthy so I can be there for all the moments that my mom couldn’t be.
Aging is a complex process and the greatest risk for developing many diseases. The mere thought of getting older carries a negative connotation on several levels, from wrinkled skin to arthritis making it hard to walk to conditions like heart disease and dementia. While aging itself is inevitable, what if we could do it better and focus more on prevention and aging well with a personalized approach? Well, we can. That’s longevity medicine.
Longevity medicine is an emerging area that is based on a shift in our way of thinking about disease. Usually, we wait for an illness to take hold and then react to it with treatment. Longevity medicine is proactive. It’s about preventing disease before it starts and optimizing every aspect of your health to delay the effects of aging. Longevity medicine combines lifestyle changes (diet, exercise and sleep) with preventative medicine, genetics, regenerative therapies, and advanced diagnostics to help us age better and smarter.
Ever wondered how some people just don’t look their age (ah-hem yes that’s me) or how others look much older than they really are? There are two ways to think about your age. Your chronological age refers to the number of years you have been alive and your biological age refers to the age estimated by your physical health, which is influenced by genetics, lifestyle and diet. Ultimately, your biological age looks at how old you are at a cellular level and how effective your cells are operating and regenerating. It’s your biological age that matters most and determines our health status. Often our chronological age and biological age measure about the same. But what if your biological age could be younger than your chronological age? Longevity medicine aims to accomplish just that.
Longevity medicine optimizes our biological age so we can hopefully prevent or delay age related-disease and increase our healthspan. Healthspan refers to the period of time in our lives where we are free of age-related disease or disability while lifespan describes the number of years we’ve been on the planet. If you can optimize your healthspan, you will likely increase your lifespan. Now the tie into dermatology. Skinspan, which refers to the time we can maintain vibrant healthy skin. Skinspan isn’t just cosmetic though. To help maintain your skinspan, lifestyle recommendations like not smoking, using sunscreen and eating a balanced diet also benefit the rest of the body.
Longevity medicine is designed to be specific to you—an individual approach to understand your risk for certain diseases using biomarkers and then develop a plan to address those risks. Longevity medicine plans typically target cellular function, especially the mitochondria or powerhouse our cells, reduce chronic inflammation (also known as inflammaging), balance gut health, maintain cognitive function and restore hormone balance. While diet, exercise, stress management and quality sleep are the foundational aspects of longevity medicine, research suggests that some therapeutic interventions such as micro-dosing GLP-1s, hormone optimization, peptide therapy, NAD+ precursors, rapamycin, metformin, and regenerative procedures like stem cell therapy may also be beneficial. However, more research is needed to evaluate biomarker testing, clinically validate interventions and establish standardized practices.
Trotter’s Take: Longevity medicine is a forward-thinking approach to maximize our healthspan so that we can live longer with a better quality of life.
Thinking about increasing your healthspan? Then you need to check out my podcast with Dr. Ted Lain as we break down where longevity medicine stands today and what he’s doing to live smarter and healthier.
