Health Wanted: Longevity Science

The Episode

After a month of Halloween-themed shows, everyone is probably a little tired of talking about dying. Finally, it’s time to start living...maybe forever. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow is looking at the field of longevity science to see how close we are to cheating death, and what’s still in the realm of fantasy. Laurel also sits down with Dr. Tom Frieden to discuss his new book, “The Formula for Better Health,” to talk about what practical changes everyone can make to live a longer, healthier life.

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The Listener Questions

If I'm in perimenopause, do I need to get on estrogen ASAP? 

The reports are saying that a retrospective view of 120 million medical records found that women who started estrogen therapy at least 10 years before menopause had a 60% lower chance of developing breast cancer, heart attack, or stroke compared to women who did not. There was also a smaller reduction in risk for women who started estrogen after the onset of menopause compared to women who did not take estrogen, but there was an increased risk of stroke in this group.

This is in line with what research is starting to suspect about estrogen therapy: The timing of when it's started really matters. The recommendations have been that women should start estrogen within 10 years of menopause, so this paper would move that starting period up even sooner.

Some of the caveats of this are that it's a retrospective study. So it can only include women who didn’t die from breast cancer or cardiovascular issues before menopause. There’s also the fact that health care access is a barrier to being able to access estrogen therapy. So it’s possible that there are factors related to income or socioeconomic status that are more protective than the estrogen itself. 

Can the boric acid used to make my futon flame resistant cause negative health effects for my fetus?

Good news: This is not something you need to worry about. 

When people talk about boric acid being dangerous to fetal development, they’re talking about it in the context of boric acid vaginal suppositories, which will not give the same level of exposure as what you’d get sitting on a couch. And even then, the data showing harm when pregnant people use boric acid suppositories is still pretty weak.

There’s data that feeding animals large amounts of boric acid has adverse effects on reproduction, but that’s also different than the amount absorbed through vaginal suppositories.

It’s still not recommended pregnant people use boric acid, simply for the theoretical risk.

Do mRNA COVID vaccines really help cancer survival?

Our bodies are developing tumors all the time, but our immune system deals with most of them before we even know they’re there. However, some tumors have tricks that get by this.

One is to display a protein called PD-L1 which binds to a protein on our T cells (usually be cells that stop the cancerous growth). When they bind it signals to the T cell that these cancer cells shouldn't be killed. The cancerous cells that are growing and growing into tumors lie to your immune system to hide from it. Cancer researchers have found that when you give someone a drug called an “immune checkpoint inhibitor,” or ICI, it stops the cancerous cells from being able to lie. It tells the T cells to attack.

Unfortunately, not everyone responds to these ICIs. Some people have tumors that figure out they can get around the inhibitors by messing with the interferon production that’s necessary to get your body to send T cells to attack the tumor to begin with.

So, in a study that I talked about back in July, researchers used a sort of general mRNA vaccine to stimulate interferon production right away, which activates  the T cells quickly and alerts them to the presence of a tumor. And that worked pretty well! They saw that when they gave this sort of general vaccine to mice who had tumors that were engineered to not respond to the immune checkpoint inhibitors, those tumors started to shrink.

Then they gave the mice this vaccine and the immune checkpoint inhibitors and it worked even better. That’s why it was being called a “universal cancer vaccine,” because it didn’t have to be a vaccine matched to the genetics of whatever tumor an individual had, it could just be designed to elicit a general immune response.

That brings us to a new article from the same lab.

In a trial you have to compare your intervention to something to see if there’s a difference. Sometimes that is a completely inert placebo, sometimes it’s a different vaccine to maintain blinding, and sometimes it’s the old version of whatever you are used to using so you know if the new thing works better than the old.

Back in 2016, the lead author of this paper did another mouse study where he designed mRNA vaccines to match the specific genetic makeup of certain tumors and compared the outcomes to using a general mRNA vaccine that wasn’t matched to the tumors genetics. Within those studies they found that the control group of these general mRNA vaccines actually had a pretty big effect on shrinking the tumor growth just on its own, which was surprising.

So, fast forward now, the researchers wondered if they would see the same results from mRNA COVID vaccines. That’s what caused them to go back and look at cancer treatment data and see that, for people who got an mRNA COVID vaccine within 100 days of starting cancer treatments for advanced lung cancers and certain melanomas, treatment which included immune checkpoint inhibitors, those people had better survival rates than the people who had similar treatments but no COVID vaccines.

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