Truly one cannot stop the clock from adding more years to one’s age. But with a balanced lifestyle and positive outlook in life, one can actually reverse what is known as “biological age”.
“Many people do not know this, but biological age can be made younger if somebody starts physical training, changes diet, takes medicines and normalizes many factors that were not in normal level before,” said Dr. Reuven Zimlichman, chairman of the Department of Medicine and head of the Department of Hypertension at the E. Wolfson Medical Center. “Change what we eat, change the activity we do, change unhealthy things, like lifestyle. Yes, you will add number to your chronological age, but you will lower your biological age.”
Zimlichman was one of the “rock stars of medicine” who visited the country last week to speak at the Experts’ Convergence for Health Outcomes (Echo) Summit 2017. The one-day conference organized by United Laboratories Inc. (Unilab) had the theme “Degenerative Disease: Pearls and Pitfalls”, which attracted more than a thousand doctors.
Zimlichman said biological age is dictated by one of the most silent and inevitable health conditions known to man: arterial aging.
Categorized as a degenerative disease, arterial aging is an inevitable health condition wherein arteries and blood vessels undergo series of functional and structural changes that occur with age, he said.
“Your chronological age is 60, but your arteries are aged 80, or could be 40. This is a result of accumulated factors during many years that affected arteries, like improper way of life and bad genes,” he said.
Zimlichman pointed out that if one’s arteries are getting older at an unprecedented rate, it could lead to cardiovascular diseases, like myocardial infarction, stroke and renal failure, among others.
The major factors that catalyze arterial aging include bad genetics, life habits, smoking, alcohol drinking, lack of physical activities, mental stress and unhealthy diet, Zimlichman said.
So unlike chronological age, which will just keep on adding numbers from birth, Zimlichman said arterial aging could be reversed through proper lifestyle, balanced diet and medications.
Obstetrician Dr. Rodney Baber, a clinical professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Sydney Medical School, shared Zimlichman’s point: prevention is better than cure.
For Baber, a glass of milk every day and proper exercise could spare people from one of the most common degenerative diseases known today: osteoporosis.
“You must start young to maximize peak bone density,” Baber said. Bone density defines the healthiness of one’s bones, and Baber pointed out that building up one’s bone mass prevents the disease. Baber’s message comes in a time when there are already advanced and readily available medical technologies to address various cases and stages of osteoporosis.
“Osteoporosis affects 75 million people worldwide. After the age 50, about one woman in three, and one man in five, will suffer an osteoporotic fracture,” he said.
Baber enumerates some of the preventive measures an individual can do to prevent the early onset of osteoporosis: increasing bone density by having adequate dietary calcium (through food or supplements); having adequate vitamins; having a healthy lifestyle with regular weight-bearing exercise; doing away with cigarette smoking; and avoiding excessive intake of caffeine and alcohol, among others. However, if worse comes to worst, patients diagnosed with osteoporosis should not be worried, Baber said.
There are already a wide range of medical interventions addressing osteoporosis, particularly for women, depending on their age and status, available today. Some of these are menopausal hormone therapy, tibolone, the use of selective estrogen receptors modulators, such as tamoxifen and raloxifene, and bisphophonates rankl inhibitors like denosumab.
“Fracture prevention is our goal. Osteoporic fractures are often silent, misdiagnosed and under treated,” Baber said.
“My message here is that we need to use a variety of treatments to make sure each of our patients can have longer life,” Baber added.
Another globally renowned medical expert who spoke at the Echo Summit 2017, Dr. Siegfried Kasper, urged people to break stereotypes on having a mental disorder. “We have to inform our patients that these mental disorders are brain disorders and not disorders of lesions like stroke,” Kasper pointed out.
He said about 90 percent of the time, physical symptoms, like recurrence of common headache and body pains, are not properly diagnosed, or doctors could not identify their organic cause. “Patients with depression are often present with numerous physical complaints. As the number of physical complaints increases, so does the likelihood of a mood disorder.”
Kasper noted that depression, the leading mental disorder, remains underdiagnosed across the world. And if a person is diagnosed with depression, there is only 34-percent probability that he will seek proper treatment.
Filipinos should also be wary of mental health as everyone could suffer from depression, he said. “There is a certain threshold on depression. Some have higher threshold, while some have higher vulnerability.”
Kasper emphasized that if one is diagnosed with depression, he or she must seek proper medication and treatment to have a higher rate of recovery.
“The longer a patient is ill, the lower his or her chances of recovering,” Kasper said, citing a study on the correlation between the rate of patient’s recovery and the years he or she was suffering from depression. Kasper urged Filipino medical practitioners, particularly the psychologists and psychiatrists, to remain truthful and pragmatic with their patients about the status of their mental state.
“We must listen to the patients, to what they feel and undergo. We have to use monitor response and use critical decision points on their case,” he said. “More so, we must give them realistic hope about their mental health. You need to realize depression can cause a lot of disability in your patients.”
The annual Echo Summit, which started in 2015, is part of Unilab’s efforts to support Filipino doctors and provide them a venue for excellent continuing medical education.
“Echo, which is now on its third year, is a continuing commitment of Unilab’s specialty cluster to medical education, bringing in opportunities to our highly valued partners for health care,” said Biofemme General Manager Herman T. Eslin, who served as the Echo Summit 2017 Organizing chairman.
“Echo Summit is a result of Unilab’s advocacy of ensuring Filipino doctors are kept abreast of the evolving medical practices worldwide. As you know, the practice of medicine is a continuous learning process,” Eslin said.