Ethan Weiss, M.D.: A masterclass in cardiovascular disease and growth hormone - two topics that are surprising interrelated

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead, we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is my good friend, Dr. Ethan Weiss. Ethan and I have known each other for a few years. We both sit on the advisory board of a company called Virta Health, and we've always found ourselves sitting around the table at these meetings or elsewhere, just having super nerdy discussions and we just decided we gotta at least put some of these discussions on the podcast. So what follows is a really deep and for me, certainly interesting discussion about two topics that at the surface seem completely unrelated. Cardiovascular disease and the role of growth hormone and IGF in disease. Now, it won't be clear from what I just said why one guy would be an expert on both of those things, but as the story unfolds, you'll see that Ethan is quite a unique individual. By training, he's a cardiologist. He specializes in preventative cardiology at UCSF, trained at Hopkins in both medical school and in his residency and then completed his fellowship at UCSF where he has since remained. And his interests are wide ranging from prevention and all aspects of it, which includes lipids and the management of blood pressure and the endocrine system, et cetera. But what I found most interesting in this discussion, in addition to just the master's class in understanding everything from acute coronary syndrome to all of the complex nuances around stent placement, which is something that I think anybody listening to this knows at least somebody who's had a stent placed and to sort of go through all of that literature in detail and understand who are the ideal candidates versus who is not. All of that, I don't wanna say paled in comparison because that would minimize it, but it was nothing compared to at least for me diving into what led him to pursue this field of endocrinology and specifically what he found with respect to growth hormone and IGF. And this is something I only knew about Ethan maybe six to nine months ago. It was really quite recent that this came onto my radar about his level of expertise in this. And so we just spend a great deal of time talking about this and you could almost think of this as two separate podcasts, one that really deals with cardiovascular disease, specifically interventional radiology and diagnostic techniques. We talk extensively about calcium scores and CT angiograms and things like that that we get asked about all the time. And then there's basically a second podcast here, which is a really interesting discussion around growth hormone, its effect on the liver, the brain, et cetera. Finally, we touch really briefly at the end on a company that Ethan has started quite recently called Keyto or Keyto depending on how you pronounce it. Which is a breath analyzer for acetone. So again, nothing that novel there, but what is novel is the way this device works and socially kind of provides feedback and allows you to get great feedback when you're fasting or on a ketogenic diet or something like that. So I hope you enjoy this podcast. This is one of those ones where the show notes are really gonna be helpful, especially for people who actually want to go back and look through all of the literature in all the clinical trials we talk about. And even just some of the diagrams, frankly, to even understand when we're talking about EKG changes and things like that, sometimes the diagrams help. So without further delay, please welcome my guest, Dr. Ethan Weiss.