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What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

lifespanbook.com

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Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#71

Post by eesmith »

outworlder wrote: post #64
eesmith wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> behavior that's healthier You presume it's healthier. Suppose that 99.99% of the 80+ year-olds who try this end up breaking their leg, getting a heart attack, etc., and this one data point is from the 0.01% which benefits. Likely not - but that's why we have double blind studies.

We _know_ it's 'healthier' than drinking and playing video games.

Yes, because we have far more than one data point.

Nor am I going to take up smoking because a 111 year old smokes them regularly.

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#72

Post by Broken_Hippo »

nradov wrote: post #39
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really isn't. "Control your medication" might leave you dead if you are diabetic or leave you hearing voices if your meds control a psychiatric condition. In the same vein, you don't really get a choice in most cancers. Sure, you can do things like never smoke tobacco, but you might just be an 8-year-old with bone cancer. And lots of other afflictions and diseases are similar in this manner, much like you prob…

Most patients with type-2 diabetes can reduce or even eliminate their need for medication through lifestyle changes. https://www.virtahealth.com/research

Type 1 exists, and often starts in childhood. Some of the folks with type 2 won't be able to control it with lifestyle changes, there is no evidence that you can cure it, and it has been pretty common knowledge that you have better results if you eat healthily.

Your link is an advertisement, however, and doesn't back up your claims. Sure, they cite research - 6 papers - but they were funded by Virta. [1] At least some of the research was done by cofounders.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#73

Post by Avlin67 »

you NEED to exercise YOUNG to BENEFIT when OLD

exercise at 80 if you never did before is not optimal

My two grandfathers never went to the gym yet strong physic and mind. One died in his garden, the other one died while stone cutting. Both 80+, no any supplements whatsoever

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#74

Post by nradov »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #72
nradov wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most patients with type-2 diabetes can reduce or even eliminate their need for medication through lifestyle changes. https://www.virtahealth.com/research

Type 1 exists, and often starts in childhood. Some of the folks with type 2 won't be able to control it with lifestyle changes, there is no evidence that you can cure it, and it has been pretty common knowledge that you have better results if you eat healthily. Your link is an advertisement, however, and doesn't back up your claims. Sure, they cite research - 6 papers - but they were funded by Virta. [1] At least som…

The link backs up my claims. Apparently you didn't read the underlying research papers.

No one is claiming a cure for type-2 diabetes, or that it works for every single patient. So I think your comment was not made in good faith. However, dietary changes can put it into remission for many patients. This has to be a permanent lifestyle change; it's not something they can just do just temporarily to fix the underlying pathology.

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#75

Post by eesmith »

suryong wrote: post #40

What we really need is robust treatments that either slow down the ageing process or reverse it to some extent. There is some promising research relating to both slowing and reversing. The current approach where we treat age related disease as individual things will never really work out in the long term One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every ani…

> One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given

Note every animal. Quoting https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1:

] Although the overwhelming majority of studies on the effect of rapamycin on longevity in mice have shown a significant increase in lifespan, there are five studies that have reported either no effect or reduced lifespan when treated with rapamycin.

When you write "every animal it is given" .. do you mean only flies and mice?

I've been having a hard time finding results for any other animals.

There's a decade of research with marmosets (here's a 2012 mention about it in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/492S18a ), but none of the papers I find report lifespan, only secondary measures (eg, "Long-term treatment with the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin has minor effect on clinical laboratory markers in middle-aged marmosets" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.22927 ).

Since marmosets live for about 15 to 16 years, surely there should be something concrete by now if it has the same effect on middle-aged marmosets when the research started.

I found there's research for dogs, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8507265/ says it's also ongoing. I haven't found any published results on lifespan only, again, on secondary effects (eg, quoting the paper, "An initial randomized, double-blind veterinary clinical trial confirmed the safety of this treatment and provided indications of potential efficacy (benefits for cardiac function) in dogs".)

What other animals have shown improved lifespan with rapamycin?

If it's only flies and (most) mice, is that really enough to call it "promising" in humans?

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#76

Post by avgDev »

1e-9 wrote: post #69
avgDev wrote: post #15

This is survivorship bias at its finest. What his father is experiencing is luck mixed with good genetics. Plus, additional support of good diet and exercise. Yes, we all can control our diets and exercise. However, we cannot control the medication that we take, which carry side effects. We cannot control what is in our food, we cannot control the air we breath, we cannot control cancer and hundreds other diseases. T…

I agree that the father appears lucky to have avoided issues such as debilitating disease due to random genetic mutation. Even the father acknowledges that "lots of good luck" was involved. The article does not appear to overstate the significance of this single example. Anecdotes are not useless. They can be inspirational and they can help illuminate possibilities and methods that are otherwise opaque in large-sampl…

I addressed some of this in another comment: "You can control the side effects you may get from a medication you take? If you get an infection you are taking meds. If you get kidney stones, you are very likely getting meds, if you injure yourself and need surgery you are getting meds. These carry risks, therefore, every time your chances of "perfect health" are decreasing. I get that most people on HN, can control the air they breath as they have the means to decide where they want to live, this isn't the case for most of the people.

Cancer is literally just a numbers game, people in perfect health at their PEAK get diagnosed with cancer. A top club soccer player is now going through testicular cancer treatment.

I am not sure how general person can control any of this."

I don't disagree that exercise and healthy habits can be great for your health. But the post seemed like it ignored all the other factors.

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#77

Post by suryong »

eesmith wrote: post #75
suryong wrote: post #40

What we really need is robust treatments that either slow down the ageing process or reverse it to some extent. There is some promising research relating to both slowing and reversing. The current approach where we treat age related disease as individual things will never really work out in the long term One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every ani…

> One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given Note every animal. Quoting https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1 : ] Although the overwhelming majority of studies on the effect of rapamycin on longevity in mice have shown a significant increase in lifespan, there are five studies that have reported either no eff…

Of course we cannot be 100 % sure it will work for humans, but the results on mice are promising and they are replicated by different labs which is very rare for anti-aging compounds. Rapamycin consistently shows effect. The effect on humans probably won't be anywhere near the 25% increase that is shown on mice, we will maybe get some extra years + better health span but the cumulative effect on society will probably be more than any current intervention. If we look at how ageing appears on different mammals, it is actually remarkably similar in terms of the decline, the speed is just different so I would say it is indeed quite promising if the mice results are replicated majority of times.

There was study on a drug what is now called Everolimus (mTOR inhibitor) and it showed that it increases the influenza vaccine effectiveness on elderly people https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25540326/

The dog aging study is ongoing and they are conducting double-blind placebo controlled trial for rapamycin on dogs. https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/tech-entrepreneurs-pledge-25-mi...

Some smaller scale study on rapamycin for dogs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411365/

I just don't think there is any compound currently that is more promising than rapamycin, so that's why I mentioned it here.

The most promising future treatment seems to do with cellular reprogramming as it increasingly looks like epigenetic alterations are responsible for a large part of aging, the epigenetic drift theory of aging. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-019-0204-5

Good video about epigenetic drift theory by Vera Gorbunova from University of Rochester. https://youtu.be/FhfXP_MX0U4?t=639

The current way of doing medicine for the elderly will never work simply because of ageing, it is like trying to bail water from a sinking ship without fixing the hole. Will work for a short while until it doesn't. I am also very skeptical of getting a working treatment for diseases like Alzheimer's disease without intervening in ageing.

Already when I was a teenager I realized that treating ageing is the holy grail of medicine and it seems recently this field is gaining more attention, but realistically it will be decades in minimum until we get some more radical treatments, might be even longer. At least the billionaires have realized that there is not much point being a billionaire if your body is breaking apart.

All we have now is lifestyle choices, possibly some medicine like rapamycin, and just hoping we don't get unlucky. Worrying trend is also people taking HGH for anti-aging but in the lab it seems to have complete opposite effect, it actually seems more like ageing accelerator.

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#78

Post by Broken_Hippo »

nradov wrote: post #74
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type 1 exists, and often starts in childhood. Some of the folks with type 2 won't be able to control it with lifestyle changes, there is no evidence that you can cure it, and it has been pretty common knowledge that you have better results if you eat healthily. Your link is an advertisement, however, and doesn't back up your claims. Sure, they cite research - 6 papers - but they were funded by Virta. [1] At least som…

The link backs up my claims. Apparently you didn't read the underlying research papers. No one is claiming a cure for type-2 diabetes, or that it works for every single patient. So I think your comment was not made in good faith. However, dietary changes can put it into remission for many patients. This has to be a permanent lifestyle change; it's not something they can just do just temporarily to fix the underlying…

I very highly doubt most of the folks are reading the research pages: I, like most folks here, am not a scientist, doctor, nor dietician. So I do have to look at other things to assess whether or not information is trustworthy before I take it at its word.

I'm not even saying that diet doesn't help. Neither is anyone else.

What I am saying is that your link is an advertisement for a paid service in the US, is done on a limited number of studies and some of those studies are done by a couple of the folks that founded the company. Not to mention that they funded the studies. These things actually make me doubt the entire premise for these links.

From what I can tell, they are basically pushing keto on diabetics. This particular diet program isn't a cure-all, nor does it perform better or have fewer risks than other diets. I don't doubt diet helps, I'm just doubting that this particular diet is something to push on others unless there is more research on this particular diet.

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#79

Post by huijzer »

dekhn wrote: post #32
avgDev wrote: post #15

This is survivorship bias at its finest. What his father is experiencing is luck mixed with good genetics. Plus, additional support of good diet and exercise. Yes, we all can control our diets and exercise. However, we cannot control the medication that we take, which carry side effects. We cannot control what is in our food, we cannot control the air we breath, we cannot control cancer and hundreds other diseases. T…

There is ample evidence in medical research that diet (to the extent that people have control over what they eat) has huge impacts on quality of life at high ages. All of this is about taking actions that reduce risk statistically. None of this is about a magic action that will prevent all disease.

Probably "diet is correlated with quality of life at high ages".

Re: What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

#80

Post by mandeepj »

cma wrote: post #24
mandeepj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, we cannot control the medication that we take, which carry side effects. >We cannot control what is in our food, we cannot control the air we breath, we cannot control cancer and hundreds other diseases. Seriously? The answer to all of the above - Yes, we can!

I assume what he means with medications is if the benefits outweigh the side effects, that person is stuck with the side effects.

One can at least "try" to find a similar ayurvedic medicine. It has no side effects
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