During my 12 years in Cardiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins, we followed a cohort of master athletes ranging from 60-80 years of age. One question we asked was whether the well-tended elder heart would be the rate-limiting organ for those seeking very long lifespans. Rest assured, it was not. In fact, heart function in elder athletes was very similar physiologically as compared to younger hearts.
So, if you exercise and train regularly, your heart remains youthful in nature.
But, how about our immune systems? What keeps our immune systems healthy and youthful? Well, we actually know very little about immunologic patterns of health. We know very little about how we can tend to our immune systems.
So, a recent article forwarded to me by Anatara’s Senior Immunology Advisor, Dr. Aftab Ansari, Professor at Emory University, was very encouraging since it begins to describe the immunology of health. In fact, immunologic patterns of exceptional aging were recently described by a group of scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (Vallejo et al.)
Why is this so important? Well, most people intuitively know that their immune system is truly unique and individualized. The challenge is to support each individual’s immune systems into a healthier and more robustly youthful pattern. But how do we do this? We know for certain that medications don’t help create immunologic patterns of exceptional aging; we know that stressful lives or dietary habits don’t either.
At Anatara, we have championed the concept of highly individualized medicine. We have been proponents of the use of biomarkers of immune function, and have linked this quantitative approach to a convergence medicine model of healthcare. We take the best of Western medicine and layer it onto deep forms of Eastern and European traditions that allow us to understand each individual’s pattern of health – the pattern that best predicts how to meet our goals for exceptional aging.