#434 Longevity Doctor Reveals How Genetics Affect Your Longevity

Dr. Anil Bajnath (0:00)

If you're speaking to an MD and you say the term detox, they're going to think, oh, it's quackery. But the reality is, we do bioaccumulate these different forms of environmental exposures and store it in our tissues. All of our collective efforts in history, in medicine and healthcare science, have kind of all culminated into what we now know as precision medicine.

Siim Land (0:20)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Anil Bajnath. Anil is the founder and president of the American Board of Precision Medicine and the Institute for Human Optimization. Anil, welcome to the show.

Dr. Anil Bajnath (0:34)

Thank you for having me.

Siim Land (0:35)

It's a pleasure. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the podcast. And I guess we can start with, you could explain people what is like precision medicine. So it's something many people might have a vague understanding of, but it's also like a relatively new term. So what is it specifically?

Dr. Anil Bajnath (0:58)

Well, no, and I think that's a great question. So I feel as though like all of our collective efforts in history in medicine and healthcare science and its various applications have kind of all culminated into what we now know as precision medicine. We've reached this point in our understanding of, you know, human physiology stemming from the genome all the way up the molecular level to our structural composition that embodies, you know, who we are as our existent being that could be quantified on multiple different sub levels. And just to put it simply, you know, precision medicine is defined by the NIH as the interface between biology, lifestyle, and environment. To me, that just sounds like really good medicine, right? How do we look at these different molecular associations between our genotype and our environment? And if there's a mismatch, how does that influence our pathophysiology or potential for developing disease? So again, precision medicine is mostly all encompassing this interface between biology, lifestyle, and environment, which has led me down multiple different levels of study from genomics and its clinical application to exposomics and how there are these different environmental factors that influence our gene expression.

Siim Land (2:24)

Right. So it's a very like individualized form of medicine, of not looking at people as a big population of people, but also just mostly looking at individuals and their specific genes and environment.

Dr. Anil Bajnath (2:41)

That's one way of putting it. I definitely think that, you know, it's highly individualized medicine. And what you're referring to with the population-based studies is that in the literature and conventional academia, we have this belief that the larger the end value of a clinical study that gets down to a p-value of 0.05 has its clinical relevancy and impact on decision-making, on whether or not to do a drug or not a drug. Right?

That's like the gold standard of what we call evidence-based practices, getting these really large end values at which, again, an end value is the amount of participants in a clinical study. And the higher the value, the stronger the data. Right? But what's missing from that concept is, you know, everybody that's in this study has a very unique genotype and a unique phenotype. And that genotype influences the receptivity to intervention. And, you know, one clinical kind of application to that is the concept of pharmacogenomics, where if we're studying a very specific drug or herbal supplement or whatever it is, you know, for intervention, an individual's genotype or book of life, you know, influences their receptivity to the drug based on the rate of metabolism, right? As you may know, there are certain people that are very slow metabolizers of certain drugs, right? Their cytochrome P450 pathways, you know, 2D6, 1A1, you know, C19, all these different subdivisions within the liver that metabolizes that drug. And some people could be very slow, or some people could be very fast. And that influences their receptivity to that intervention. And whether or not, you know, dosing and everything else. Which ties into the precision medicine paradigm of being able to have the right patient with the right medication, the right dose, at the right time, you know, to kind of really, you know, improve their outcomes. But again, that large population-based narrative is going, I think, shifting towards what we know as N of 1 medicine. Where essentially, you know, you are going to be at the center of your own clinical study. Where looking at all those different individual compositional components influences your health outcomes. So I think this shift from the N of 10,000s and high values towards N of 1 medicine is going to be a very important component in the personalization of medicine.