Medicine physiology optimum
150 years ago, human life expectancy was about 45 years. Improvements in hygiene and advances in medicine have pushed life expectancy to 80 years and this figure is expected to improve further.
Humans are in peak shape around the age of 25, a period where their main preoccupation is to reproduce and to raise children.
Towards the age of 45, many experience lower energy levels, tiredness, weight gain, less satisfying sleep, lower libido, less patience, near sightedness, and failing memory. These are the first signs of aging.
The causes of aging are many and the importance of each of these cause vary from one person to the next. Some people have behavior patterns that contribute to an acceleration of their aging process.
Anti-Aging medicine is a fast evolving science.
Remediable causes of aging are:
- Glycation [cross linking]: an unwanted binding reaction between sugar and protein molecules. This binding reaction hinders the function of the affected protein molecule.
- Oxidation: a sometimes unwanted reaction where electrons are robbed from important molecules such as DNA and others. Thus, vital molecules can be injured.
- Hormono pause: is a decrease in level of important hormones. Hormones are molecules that transmit messages to our cells by binding to receptors on their outer membranes. Our cells await these messages to know when to get to work.
When hormones [pregnenolone, DHEA, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, and melatonin] are produced in lesser quantities, those cells which are awaiting these hormones on their receptors will be less active. Thus brain cells, muscle cells, bone cells, and others, are adversely affected. - Those hormones which increase with age: insulin and sometime cortisol.
In an effort to understand your strengths and weaknesses with the aging process, Dr. Cloutier will firstly evaluate as many biological parameters as possible. Next, the physician will provide advice on nutrition, food supplements, physical activity, and will recommend hormone replacement(s) if needed – all this with the aim to reduce oxidation, glycation, and hormonal deficiencies which all contribute to the symptoms of aging.
Anti-Aging medicine is the best form of preventive medicine but does not replace your regular primary care medicine. Your Anti-Aging medical records can be sent to your primary care physician if wanted.
You will age nevertheless, however you will look otherwise younger and you will feel good.
Someone who is old can often be heard saying « It is no longer like when I was 20 years old ».
Someone on a good Anti-Aging program will say « I have never felt better ».
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi won the nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine in 1937 for his discovery and characterization of vitamin C. Even then, Szent-Gyorgyi understood that the vitamin had a much greater role in human biology than was recognized at the time. In his acceptance speech for the Prize, he said: " the medical profession itself took a very narrow and very wrong view. Lack of ascorbic acid [vitamin C] caused scurvy, so if there was no scurvy there was no lack of ascorbic acid. Nothing could be clearer than this. The only trouble was that scurvy is not a first symptom of a lack but a final collapse, a premortal syndrome and there is a very wide gap between scurvy and full health. " Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)
"The doctor of the future will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease" Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)
The description of hormones according to Voltaire: " The brain, believed the seat of the understanding , was attacked as violently as the heart, which is said to be the seat of the passions. How incomprehensible mechanical organs submitted to feeling and thinking? How one painful idea bothers does the price of blood? And how the blood is in turn does its irregularities in the human mind? What is this unknown fluid and whose existence is certain, that the quicker, more active than the light, fly, in less than a blink of an eye, in all channels of life, produces sensations, memory , sadness or joy, reason, or dizziness, recalls with horror what would forget, and is thinking of an animal or an object of admiration, or a subject of pity and tears? " Voltaire (1694-1778)
