You thought zombie cells would be in a bad movie or an overly popular zombie
apocalypse TV show, right? It sounds like that,
but actually zombie cells have been around since the 60s. They'd been around
forever. They're a major part of aging. We just didn't know about it until the 60s.
They're not that new. They're also called senescence cells or senescent cells. So I
will talk about those in just a minute, where they are, what are they, who's doing
work on them, guys that may have been doing a lot of work on them. They've
actually got a medication for them, but it's not quite ready for primetime at
least in terms of prevention. And we'll talk about why in just a minute.
But before we do, just a brief introduction to the series. This is part 8
of a series on "Lifespan" by David Sinclair. David Sinclair is a PhD
researcher at Harvard in aging. He's been into aging for a very very long time, and
he covers a lot of the things in his book, his new book "Lifespan" that I cover
in my channel. So I've been having a blast doing this series, and I hope
you've enjoyed it as well. He goes into a lot of the basics and talks about his
own theory of aging - the information theory - where basically we begin to lose
our epigenetic functions, our ability to access information that's still
within our DNA, the same DNA that we had in our 20s. But for some reason, we
just can't access it as well. He also talks in the book this image right here
is from his book. It's the hallmarks of aging. And again we mentioned many of
these things in the channel. He discusses them in the book; for example deregulated
nutrient sensing, altered intercellular communications, loss of proteostasis,
stem cell exhaustion, mitochondrial dysfunction, epigenetic alteration. Again,
that's really deep in terms. That's probably the most popular theory right
now, and it's a very much related to his information theory, genomic instability,
and of course cellular senescence. We're going to talk about cellular
senescence now in this video. This prescription drug bottle that you see
called Sprycel is dasatinib. It's was developed by folks in Mayo but I'm
getting ahead of myself again. Let's go back and talk about the history and a
little bit more about what they what we know about it, what we've seen in terms
of senescence cells. They were discovered in 1961. Macrophages are more commonly
noticed and dirtied asthma as senescence cells but you can see it in tissue to
multiple tissue types. The cell actually shuts down its processes like
epigenetics. Some people say it's like a grumpy retiree cell. Now what this cell
does is it protects protects it from DNA damage so therefore there is actually...
some theorize purpose to these senescence cells shutting down your
epigenetics will protect yourself from cancer. So that appears to be one of the
functions of senescence cells. Another function appears to have to do with
healing. On the other hand though, this is an inflammatory process. It sends out
cytokines. And you may remember cytokines are... "cyto" meaning cell, "kines" meaning
attractants. So it attracts immune cells to come to this area and start creating
inflammation. That's what immune cells do. So it recruits other cells in terms of
this grumpy retiree process as well. Now Sinclair described the blue
galactosidase stain in these zombie cells.
Mayo researchers remove these cells in mice, and the mice lived 30% longer. And
again, they removed them with a couple of different methods. One of them dacatnib
an immunoglobulin plus quercetin which is a chemical from onions, wine, green tea.
And that medication now is used for leukemias. It's again a more of a
heavy-duty medication. And I think anybody's going to want to take it for or
by prolonging life. Now do I supplement? No, obviously, I don't, clearly don't try
to supplement this myself. But I do a couple of other things. I do fasting. I do
extended water fasts in 2 days every week. This is a Tuesday, by the way, when
I'm recording this, so on my second day of an extended water fasts. I also have... I
would say maybe 3 to 5 glasses of wine per week, have onions, garlic, green
tea. So I do think I'd get my quercetins naturally. I don't take to get
dacatnib, as I said. Now just back to one overall statement.
Remember, it's cellular aging, not organ related disease or "juventude" as Valter
Longo put it in his book "The Longevity Diet."
So again, medicines arranged wrong. We don't need to be folk spending years and
years focusing on a heart, years and years focusing on the brain, and ever
look at the rest of the body. Because these diseases don't start from the
heart or the brain. They start in the cell. They start by in biochemistry. We
need much more of a metabolic focus on disease and prevention and longevity.
Thank you very much for your interest. This is Ford Brewer. I started off my career
as an ER doc. And that can be frustrating because most of the things bringing
patients into the ER can and should be prevented like heart attack and stroke.
So I went to Johns Hopkins for training in prevention, did well, ended up running
the program, trained dozens of docs there and have trained hundreds and even over
a thousand doctors since then in preventing disease. What's even more
important is I've helped thousands of patients prevent heart attack and stroke
rather than waiting for the devastation and hoping for a cure.