#363 How to Slow Down Aging with Peptides and Hormone Replacement Therapy - Dr Amy Killen

Amy Killen (0:00)

In women, I think about estrogen as being like this shield that protects women from a lot of the things that men start to develop earlier. You know, men will get cardiovascular disease a good 10 years before women do. But as soon as we lose the estrogen, unless you replace it, like with hormone therapy, then all of a sudden, all those things that affected men now really start to affect women.

Siim Land (0:18)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. Today, our guest is Dr. Amy Killen. Dr. Amy is one of the world's leading experts in anti-aging therapies, such as peptides, stem cells, hormone replacement therapy, and much more. But do you want to settle on aging? If yes, then I'm looking for more people who want to reverse their biological clock. If you're interested, then email me the word health to info at siimland.com, and I'll send you the details.

Amy, welcome back to the show.

Amy Killen (0:42)

Thank you. It's good to be here. Good to see you.

Siim Land (0:44)

Yeah, likewise. And I think, you know, we had a podcast, I think maybe like two years ago or something, and a lot of things have happened since that as well. But the reason I wanted to have you back on was that I had a tweet recently where I was listing like all these different organs that age very rapidly, like the heart and the pancreas and all the kidneys and stuff like that. And you were very wise to point out that actually the ovaries of women is actually one of the most rapidly aging organs of them all. And you're completely right about that.

And I think it's a good place to start in terms of like, why do women have, you know, the rapidly aging, or like, why do the ovaries age so rapidly?

Amy Killen (1:28)

Yeah, it's kind of the million dollar question, or probably the trillion dollar question. We don't know exactly why the ovaries age so fast, but they tend to age about two to five times faster than any other organ systems in our body, which is why by the time you're 50, for the most part, you know, the ovaries have failed and you're out of eggs, and you're not making any more hormones. And that's, you know, that's when you go into menopause, but that process starts a good 10 or 15 years before that.

And what's interesting about it is that every month, you know, we know that the ovaries will release an egg, and obviously you ovulate, but what happens is also it's releasing about 500 more eggs during that cycle that don't become the egg that ovulates. So they just kind of get partially, follicles get partially developed, and then they go through what any other cells in your body would they either go through like apoptosis, where they just die, or they go and become like senolytic, that, you know, become senescent cells. And so the process of those follicles kind of dying off is very similar to the process of other cells in our body dying off. So there's some research that shows that we may be able to slow that process down by using some of the same kinds of therapies we use, you know, elsewhere in the body for longevity.

Siim Land (2:44)

At what age does it usually happen? Like, is it at the menopause or does it depend on like the individual, like their lifestyle or something like that?

Amy Killen (2:51)

Well, we don't know for sure. I mean, certainly lifestyle plays, you know, plays into it. We know that like smokers, for instance, tend to have, they tend to go into menopause or have premature ovarian aging faster than non-smokers. Being very obese or overweight can also predispose you to going into menopause early. Unfortunately, there's a lot of hormones and things that evolved, and it hasn't been, you know, it hasn't been researched, which is really sad because, you know, half the population on earth are females. And really until the last couple of years, no one's even thought to say, hey, is there a way that we can actually delay these ovaries from aging?

And I think it's important not just for fertility sake, but also because we know that when you go into menopause, then you stop making, you know, key hormones like estrogen and progesterone for the most part, and that's going to then rapidly accelerate the rate of aging everywhere else in the body. So the ovaries are kind of like the pacemakers of the body.

They're kind of telling your body how quickly to age if you're a female. And so lifestyle plays into it. There's been some animal studies using supplements like NMN or other NAD precursors, melatonin, antioxidants like curcumin, resveratrol has been studied, metformin and rapamycin as well, the drugs. And all of those in animals have shown that they may have some benefit on delaying ovarian aging, but it hasn't been investigated in humans yet.