LEAF interviews Dr. Michael Lustgarten author of ‘Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease’.

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As part of our series covering the various researchers working on aging, we finally caught up with Dr. Michael Lustgarten author of ‘Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease’ and we did this short interview which we hope may be of interest to you.

Hi Mike can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

My name is Michael Lustgarten, and I’m currently a scientist at the Tufts University Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston, MA. I have funding to examine the role of the gut microbiome and serum metabolome on lean mass and physical function in older adults.

Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach.

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You’ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It’s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it’s a pile of sh—oh, well, you know what.

If death gives meaning to life, I suppose diseases give meaning to being healthy, and thus we should leave some diseases around so that people can appreciate not being sick, right? How often do you say yourself, ‘Hmm… I haven’t been sick in a while… I should get one of those nasty cancers, before I stop appreciating how it feels being healthy. Where’s my emergency plutonium bar?’ Personally, I don’t say that to myself very often. I mean, I can totally appreciate the feeling of not being kicked in the nuts even without ever being kicked in the nuts, really. And I can appreciate not having a certain disease even if I’m not aware the disease exists. I can totally enjoy life without dying, and I could still enjoy it even if it were impossible for me to die.

People reason by analogies. They know there are some concepts that would be more difficult to grasp without their opposite, and think the analogy can be extended to ANYTHING AT ALL. For example, if you’ve never been sad, you can’t be sure just how different it is from being happy. I’m not sure how you can get from this to ‘you need to be mortal to enjoy life’, especially when there are no real-life examples of immortal people incapable to enjoy life because of their immortality. Can you smell the pungent aroma of foxes disdaining grapes?

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There is an urgent need to develop better biomarkers and to use the in cost effective packages for accurate measurement of aging.

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As human life expectancy has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries this has led to a steady increase in the population of older people. With that increase has come the rise of age-related diseases and disabilities. As a result it is becoming ever more important to develop preventative strategies to monitor and maintain health as well as therapies that directly address the various aging processes to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

One of the ways we can do this is by developing more effective ways to measure how someone is aging, this means developing high quality aging biomarkers. The challenge in creating such biomarkers has always been the fundamental question – what do we measure?

Chronological age is a poor indication of how someone might be aging and is not a good way to ascertain an individual’s risk factor for various age-related diseases. This is simply because everyone ages differently and at different rates. Whilst everyone ages due to the same processes the speed at which these different processes occur can vary between individuals.

We’re shockingly close to reversing many causes of aging.

David Agus explains how this could help us cure cancer — it’s about quality of life, not quantity.

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A novel way to target proteins in cells could lead to undruggable diseases being treatable.

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Researchers at the university of Dundee have shown that it is possible to target and destroy specific proteins within cells using a new directed protein missile system. This is very interesting as it raises the possibility of targeting aberrant proteins present in diseases that currently have no drug that affects them.

This opens the door to treating a range of diseases as well as potentially being useful in directly targeting proteins involved in the aging process. Before we take a look at the research let’s recap on why proteins are important, what they do and how they relate to aging and diseases.

So what are proteins?