Brain, Hope, Reality: PTSI not PTSD | Hosted by Dr. Eugene Lipov

Dr. Eugene Lipov (00:02.868)
Hello, Bobby or Robert bro.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (00:08.236)
Hello.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (00:08.932)
No, my friend, thank you for the podcast. Thanks for coming down my podcast. The name of the podcast is brain hope reality, PTSD, not PTSD. I am undergoing a continuous battle or trying to change the name PTSD to PTSD post-traumatic stress injury being a biologic change. So the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast is because

I'm very fascinated with epigenetics in general. I had a degree in molecular genetics from 1980 from Northwestern. I never heard the term epigenetics. And I found out about 10 years ago, and I was listening to David Sinclair talking about longevity. And he was talking about Harvath clocks, which is, I believe, I mean, it is, I assume the first...

epigenetic clock that was developed and being a simpleton than I am, I reached out to Dr. Harworth and he connected me to you since you clearly work with Dr. Harworth at UCLA. And you and I are doing the study right now, checking out epigenetic change that happens from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder will stick to standard term. And at least there was one study that showed appropriate psychiatric care.

PTSD, if successful, can reverse aging. And I was very interested in that because I work with special forces quite often, and special forces people age quicker than an average individual because of severity of battle and severity of PTSD. Thus, we will talk about that study. And also it's going to be the big reveal. I'm 65 years old. How old am I based on epigenetics? I think it'd be fun to talk about it. So with that intro, I think if you don't mind just telling you about...

background and maybe you can talk about where it came from, the history of it, and maybe we'll dig into it, maybe we can explain it in simple terms, which, you know, I consider myself somewhat scientific, but it's still quite confusing. So you're on my time. Thank you.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (02:19.958)
Right. Well, great. Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Dr. Lipov or, uh, or Jean. Oh yeah. No, it's, it's been great getting to know you as you've been, uh, launching your, your clinical studies and, um, and, and yeah, it's an impressive. Uh, team that you've put together to manage them and, and that's too, and a very important, uh, condition and kind of area to focus on. So, you know, I'm, I'm really happy.

that I could be a part of it through the Clock Foundation, through a nonprofit that I started with Steve Horvath and spun out his epigenetic aging technology from UCLA. But yeah, I'm happy to help with that trial and to be here and try to tell you about epigenetics. And also.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (03:11.033)
Thank you. So what time, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. When was the first time epigenetic paper were published or people start talking about it? Where did that come from?

Dr. Eugene Lipov (03:24.948)
Did you hear my question, Bobby? Sorry, my question is, when did the epigenetics become actually a science and where did it come from? I remember there was a study in Danish people who were being starved by the Nazis and it led to diabetes, I think. I see that origin, but I don't know. I'm just curious. I'm new.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (03:26.39)
I did not hear your question.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (03:43.202)
Hmm. Hmm, interesting. Yeah, and that may be related to kind of the concept of epigenetic inheritance. That's kind of where a lot of people hear about epigenetics initially, are these kind of transgenerational effects, where if a family or a population experiences famine or some stress or trauma, it can have effects.

not only on them, not only on their kind of kids, but even kind of their grandkids kind of for generations to come. And that's this concept of kind of epigenetic imprinting where it can affect your genes, your gene expression, and ultimately your body. But yeah, and I guess kind of backing up epigenetics, the term epi means

above so it kind of controls the genome and so it controls gene expression in your cells and in your tissues. It kind of dictates what cellular state. So it kind of determines if a stem cell becomes a fibroblast or it becomes a neuron or a muscle cell and then it helps control...

cellular state as you age.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (05:14.124)
So can I ask you a simple question? So let me see this. I'll tell you how I understand epigenetics now, because one of the things about somebody like yourself, since you live in that space, to you it's pretty obvious, but most people probably not that obvious. So let me see if I got the basics right. So DNA is basically a molecule, dual strand of course, that has code. The only way to permanently change the code is to have a mutation.

that will change the code and that's it. So each gene can be either turned on or turned off, right? So methodalization, you can change the genes and it can turn on or turn it off. And so based on that, and the reason the way I understand and again, my particular interest is sympathetic system, fight and flight system, and the way nature designed us, it's

a way so trauma or external experience can be can activate or deactivate certain genes in your DNA, right? But it's and it's reversible.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (06:19.094)
That's exactly right. Yeah. And yeah, and it's reversible. I mean, that's what, yeah. And like along those lines, the epigenome is, it controls which genes get turned on and off and it can be influenced by your environment. So if you, uh, if you experience trauma or, or kind of famine or, uh, like your body responds to that, you know, and, and so for instance, like when, when.

people experience famine, like there's no food available. People often different oriented, like they kind of see it where caloric restriction occurs and people devote more, your body devotes more resources to kind of preserving it and not as much to reproduction. And that's an effect where it actually

extends lifespan and many different mammals and also invertebrates. And, uh, but it's, it's just an example of your body kind of responding to the environment and their epigenetic mechanisms kind of, uh, at play, but, you know, along the lines of like the fighter flight system and kind of, uh, the, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, I know one, uh, and also provide some background on epigenetic clocks.

So kind of what epigenetic clocks are, are basically these predictors where, I mean, you can think about your genome that is just decorated at different positions with these methylation sites. They get turned on or off, and they also change reliably with age. So when you're in youth, there are certain genes that get turned on to promote development.

And, and, you know, as you age, there are other genes that, you know, certain switches get turned off or on and, and that kind of lead you into middle life and eventually into, uh, into, into late life. And, and so there were certain sites that change very reliably with age. And, and what Steve Horvath did, uh, at UCLA, uh, was he, uh,

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (08:42.666)
discovered that these patterns, these patterns of, of methylation changes, you could use them to predict somebody's age. And, uh, and so for instance, with a blood draw or a saliva sample using epigenetics, you can predict somebody's age to within about a year or two years. And, um,

Dr. Eugene Lipov (09:05.812)
Can you push on that for a second? Let me just, and again, I speak hopefully for the audience that doesn't quite understand what that means. So let me see if I understand what that means. So when somebody says, based on your DNA, and you can run the test, I think it's 1,100 alleles, which is 1,100 different places, then you know somebody who is 50 years old normally, and will live to an X amount of years, right?

somebody who's had a hard life, who is biologically, who is chronologically 50, but they had a very rough life. It could be physiologically 70. So they're much older based on the DNA analysis. And the reason it's important to know that is that the 70 year old, biologically 70 year old will die sooner than the guy who is 50 year old biologically. That's basically the plan. And my reading of this, I read some...

you guys articles and it looks like there is a very high predictor, especially cardiovascular and place like that. Because most of the people in Western countries dive cardiovascular events, I think that kind of makes sense. So biologically, it's an amazing concept that as somebody ages, you can have, as you said, a predictable change, but some people go at much quicker pace.

In fact, you look at people who, let's say, heavy smokers and had a very hard life, you look at that twin brother or sister and you look at them, they look totally different and you can see a difference. Like a significant physical and people go, well, you look so much younger. There's actually a lot behind that, right? There's a biologic difference. Is that correct?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (10:52.698)
Right, right. Yeah. And epigenetic clocks, they started as just an objective marker of age. And so it's just, you know, through it, I mean, this is just a blood draw or a saliva sample and the original clocks developed in the Horvath lab, they just predict the age of any human cell type or tissue.

But like you mentioned, I mean, where it gets exciting is that epigenetics is, well, first they're modifiable. And, and, and where it's relevant is that you can track that over time. And so when you're taking a treatment, like a, a putative, a longevity protocol or treatment, you can, you can take that test before and after.

and understand if this very objective measure of age has been influenced by it. And so you can start to understand, do these treatments really affect the fundamental biology of aging? And one point was related, with the original Horvath clock, it specifically targets 353 different sites across the epigenome.

And what people are starting to do now is to kind of tease out, like, what are each of those sites doing and the biology of epigenetic clocks. But what's interesting is I think 30% to 35% of them are sites around the glutocorticoid receptor and glutocorticoid signaling. So very related to stress control.

And, um, no, but, um, but yeah, and newer versions of these clocks have been developed such as grim age, which is even better at predicting future health span and lifespan. Oh, uh, but, but again, these are just, these are objective biomarkers where you're submitting a blood sample.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (13:09.222)
It's predicting your epigenetic age, and that's being used as a proxy of your biological age. And like you mentioned, if you're five years younger on your biological age than your chronological age, you're doing well. You're kind of healthier than would be predicted for your age. And in a variety of diseases, measures like grim age are shown to be accelerated. So for instance, in...

Dr. Eugene Lipov (13:33.416)
Oh, I lost the signal buddy.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (13:37.934)
In major depression, people with grim age are accelerated by about two years. In combat veterans with PTSD, they're shown to be accelerated by about two to three years. And people are just now starting to use these measures and trials like you're doing, to really very quickly understand, is this treatment really effective for the population?

and can it target epigenetic aging?

Dr. Eugene Lipov (14:12.332)
Well, the part that I find most interesting is the clinician is, you know, the old studies of anything is you need to, since human being relative to rats are long lived, so you don't have to wait for people to die to figure out, oh, this drug really makes you live longer. Like crapamycin is one of the drugs you may be familiar with. That's been used for longevity. It's a fascinating drug. I've been taking this for a year at least. And then

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (14:39.564)
Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (14:41.536)
So the point is you can actually do something about it. And you can actually test that. You don't have to wait for an organism to double. And you can probably.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (14:44.086)
Yeah. That's been traditionally kind of the challenge with any drug or treatment that's kind of preventative medicine or trying to target the biology of aging is just the trials take way too long, right? You know, you're doing a preventative medicine study and you've got to wait seven years or 10 years to see if it's effective.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (15:09.814)
People don't want to wait that long. It's hard to get people to comply and even participate in trials like that. So epigenetic clocks are very enabling and that they enable this objective biomarker that you can use and test whether a treatment works within three months or six months or a year. And, uh, you know, and it's awful. And I mean, there are other biomarkers out there that we pay attention to in trials. They're, they're very important, like functional outcomes.

Like if you're doing a PTSD, I mean, there are simple surveys you give to people that you start to understand, like their quality of life. And if you're doing a cognitive, I mean, you can do a cognitive test. You can do functional tests for people to look at things like VO2 max, or you can look at leg strength. And again, there are simple measures we use in trials, like a sit-stand test.

or a walking speed test, which are very informative. But often a lot of these tests, when you're using them in a younger population, and have a healthier population, like what's an issue is that they experience what we call like a ceiling effect. So, and again, I'm talking here about measure, traditional measures of frailty.

of physical frailty that you can measure with like grip strength or walking speed or some cognitive tests. They're really designed to detect frailty in a pretty old population. And so it's people that are kind of in their 70s, maybe even their 80s, that are really experiencing kind of pretty rapid decline at that point. Now when you enroll people who are healthier, who are younger.

maybe in their 40s, 50s, healthy people in their 60s and 70s. The issue is that on these traditional frailty measures, they ace the test. They get a perfect score. And so the testers just really aren't sensitive enough to detect those changes in the aging process that occur earlier in life. So that's been a big advantage of epigenetic clocks. And then also what, again, going back is epigenetics are modified.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (17:30.882)
So I mean, that kind of begs the next question. Well, what is there that can influence them? What type of treatment can be effective? And there are studies that have looked at like stress control can reduce epigenetic locks, diet, some Mediterranean diets been shown to benefit epigenetic aging, vitamin D treatment and vitamin D deficient people reduced epigenetic age.

I've also been involved with a study called the TRIM trial in the TRIM-X trial that's focused on immune system regeneration, where we repurposed a cocktail of approved drugs to try to prevent immune system aging in healthy older people. And that treatment's been shown to reduce epigenetic clocks by a few years. And so for us, it's...

exciting. It's kind of inspiring that there are these approved drugs, there are these treatments that are already out there that are available, people can access, and now we have these objective biomarkers that we can use on a practical time frame within trials to test whether or not a treatment's effective. So we've been very busy kind of using them and we've done...

and over 100 collaborations and studies over the last two or three years. So it's been kind of a frenetic pace for us, but yeah, it's definitely an exciting time for the field.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (19:04.672)
So I have two questions. So question number one is how long do you think it takes from let's say there's a drug X that's effective and age reversal or a prevention like Ropamycin, let's say. But have they been any studies in Ropamycin and Apigenetics?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (19:25.474)
There have been preclinical studies that show that rapamycin reduces epigenetic aging, but I'm not aware of clinical data that's shown.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (19:37.212)
No, I'd be curious if there was anything and if you can send me any of those pre-clinical, it'd be amazing to read. Yeah, I'd love to see it. Number two, how long is it from your perspective, how long does it take to change when you can actually see measurable difference? So let's say somebody is a heavy smoker, fat, all the terrible risk factors. Poof, next month they stop smoking.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (19:44.746)
Yeah, there's definitely, yeah, definitely a reason.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (20:05.684)
they lost weight, they're doing intermittent fasting and they're exercising appropriately. How long would the change, how long does it take to change epigenetic code between the two, the same individual? Or what period of time does it change, you think?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (20:23.93)
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I'm sure it's dependent on specific treatments. And so for instance, like smoking, there are just like epidemiological studies look at the risk of smoking and find that people, when people stop, there still is this residual risk for many years. It could be 10 or 15 years before the...

the increased risk really goes away with them. And so that, so I'm not aware of data looking specifically at kind of epigenetic aging with smokers, but a couple other areas are like stress control. Yeah, in that I've seen very short term studies that where there's a benefit. And this is like a month or two, a month or two months, and they're showing an improvement with it.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (21:05.396)
Let's say that one.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (21:20.45)
And there are studies that look at vitamin D. I believe that was also a pretty short-term study, maybe a couple of months of treatment, and there was a reduction. That was, again, that was in deficient people. So that was not in healthy, kind of older people. Now treatments like the Trim-X treatment for thymus regeneration, that's a longer term, that's a longer timeframe. It's a year-long treatment, and there are some indications that it may take six to nine months, kind of at least, for that.

to have an effect. But yeah, I mean, I think with each of them also, we need to, it's great that we can get short-term data, but we also do need to pay attention to whether or not a treatment has durable effects. And also if you're seeing an improvement that's sustained, it's gonna last for a year or two years after you stop. We don't want it to just be a short-term blip. We want it to be a long-term.

and a beneficial improvement, beneficial change.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (22:22.484)
So what do you think of doing a reveal of my chronological age versus biological age?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (22:28.81)
Yeah, sounds great. So, yeah, you submitted your own blood sample for testing, and we ran the Grimage marker. And this was just based entirely on your blood sample with no other inputs. And you were predicted to be 52 and a half years old based on Grimage. Now, how old are you? 65.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (22:56.415)
65.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (22:59.074)
So that's a very good score. So I mean, 12 and a half years, less than your chronological age is, so for instance, with grim age, the risk with it, if you're seven to 10 years accelerated on it, you would have double the mortality risk for somebody your age. So conversely,

If you're seven to 10 years younger, you have half the mortality risk of somebody your age. So I mean, you have like probably 75 or 80% lower based on this measure mortality risk than what would be predicted for your age.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (23:34.837)
That's great.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (23:46.476)
I appreciate it. Well, I do try. I've changed my diet. I lost weight. I take Rappamycin and Metformin, the two drugs which are predicted to be helpful. And I do intermittent fasting. Besides that, I don't do anything else. And exercise. And I don't smoke. So thank you. That's an amazing... I didn't know that until just today, actually. So thank you for that information.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (24:13.29)
Yeah, that's an impressive score.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (24:16.944)
So I'm trying to I tell my wife I'd like to operate into my one of my into my 90s I have a big mission. There's a lot of people as PTSD would like to help and There's a lot of things to do and I'm looking forward to doing amazing things with you and epigenetics Because there's so many it's interesting the stress thing. That's the whole concept that you can change your DNA either good or bad and That that just to me is a mind-boggling concept

It's just amazing. But if you think about it, I'd like to see what you think of this concept, the way I kind of, I try to focus, why did biology, why did God made this for us? Why is there a biological evolution? So let's say you are caveman and you're being chased around by a tiger. And then if you're being chased around by a tiger, in order to survive, you need to have hypervigilance. You want to minimize the amount of reproduction you're having because you're vulnerable.

And it takes energy to produce reproduction and things like that. And then you want to pass it down to your offspring so they can survive as well. So if you look at this, my particular history, my father had horrible PTSD from World War II, his squadron of 10,100 made it home. So he gave that DNA to me that gave me, made me much more likely developed PTSD.

And I looked at my, the reason I got very serious about my health is because I had chest pain, which really turned out to be nothing, but then I did calcium scores and I had a calcium high, very high calcium score when I was 30. So I was on my way to be checked out, like in my 50s or 60s. So at the time I was 40, I really became very, and then I was fat, I wasn't taking care of myself, my stress, all of that. So actually, that was my...

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (26:00.841)
Mm.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (26:16.232)
rationale, but it would be interesting to measure my grim age because I think I was about four or five years older than my biological age then, and now it can change over time. It means a very enabling concept that it's possible because a lot of people go, well, I'm fat. You know, I can't help myself. I can't do this. You actually can do a lot of things which are very basic. Stop smoking.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (26:24.686)
Mm-hmm.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (26:38.878)
Right. Yeah. I mean, that reminds me of what happened with Steve Horvath. So he just, just a, uh, I guess two years or so ago now, he was in rolling as a control in one of our trials and he had one of those coronary artery calcium scans and he, you know, and he had a significant score and, um, and he was freaked out about it. And, and I mean, it, you know, it does give people, I mean, it's,

I think it's right on your coronary artery, right? With a plaque, I mean, they call it the widow maker kind of plaque. So it is a very serious kind of test, when you get a, it's kind of a scary biomarker, but...

Dr. Eugene Lipov (27:25.528)
You could do something with that. But let me ask you one question. What was his epigenetics score like? Was that really?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (27:30.85)
Yeah, so what he did was, I mean, similar to what you, I mean, he changed his diet. He started taking a statin, and then he was on some control treatments as part of our trial, but he improved his score significantly by about five years within a year or a year and a half.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (27:49.452)
So my only recommendation to him, if he is up to it, is take a lot of K2, vitamin K2. It sucks out calcium from the coronaries. I don't know if he's doing it. So you can buy K2 and D3 on Amazon anywhere. I would highly suggest doing it daily. If he's not doing it, he should be doing it for sure.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (27:58.987)
Mmm.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (28:10.558)
Interesting. Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (28:12.104)
right? Statins and you know, so LDL is the one that's the biggest predictor for that, not cholesterol, LDL. So my cholesterol, my LDL was like 120. So between statin and the new injectable drugs, mine is now 30 for the last two years.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (28:30.41)
Interesting. Yeah, we do that testing with Dr. Matt Budoff in LA at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. He's a preventative cardiologist and he's done several trials. I haven't heard about K2 being tested there, but they have. They've used a lot of pharmaceuticals, a lot of drugs, like PCSK9 inhibitors and statins, where they didn't find an effect, by the way, on the calcium score at least. But they looked at

There's like a type of Japanese garlic they used. It was in a firefighter study. And that was one supplement, one treatment that seemed to reduce the score. But I'll pay attention to K2.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (29:13.012)
Look at, can you tell me that garlic study? I'd be very interested in Japanese. Uh, by the way, the latest kind of talk about Japanese. So wasabi, the Japanese horse riders, I call it. And we've seen the latest study came out as far as cognitive improvement. If he take it for three months, it's a significant impact, but try to find horse riders in this country. Wow. Wasabi I went everywhere, including a Japanese store.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (29:24.078)
Mm-hmm.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (29:29.418)
Yeah. Oh, that's just it. Yeah.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (29:43.308)
Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (29:44.089)
It has real wasabi powder.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (29:46.242)
Yeah. Is it difficult now or is it, yeah. Or you're in Chicago though, right? Yeah. Maybe in LA, is it easier to find? Or is there a shortage? Is that what you're saying? There's a shortage of it?

Dr. Eugene Lipov (29:49.856)
finding it. It's almost...

Dr. Eugene Lipov (29:56.988)
I don't know. Everything.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (30:01.568)
No, no, no. Anytime you buy wasabi, like wasabi powder, sushi restaurants, Japanese stores from Japan, right? It says wasabi in it, but it's really not. It's all horseradish. It's all a lie. It's fascinating. Anyway, but yeah, chicken into K2, I think it'd be interesting. So yeah, do you do like CRP studies also? C-reactive protein?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (30:05.996)
Mm-hmm.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (30:14.365)
Okay, okay.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (30:26.198)
Yeah, we use CRP. Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (30:28.02)
Yeah, because like mine, there's been points three for the last five years, which is consistent with the finding, right?

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (30:34.21)
Yeah, that's better than mine. Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (30:37.093)
You're young, you have plenty of time to do things.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (30:39.374)
Yeah. And what did you do to reduce CRP, the K2? You think that helped with that?

Dr. Eugene Lipov (30:45.916)
No, no, no. K2 doesn't do anything with CRP. So CRP demonstrates inflammation. So I think Mediterranean diet stopping meat is huge. Meat is pro-inflammatory. Like meat, like red meat we're talking about. I think fish, I eat tons of oil, avocado oil, tons of it. No fried foods at all. Because fried foods cause inflammation. Anything pro-inflammatory

pro-inflammatory is a bad thing for you. But I think that iterated as you said, intermittent fasting I think is a really very powerful technique. So if you have a significant CRP, you may wanna think about the plunging thing. Ice plunge, I have no interest in that. But some people like that. But anything anti-inflammatory. But it's interesting, for example, I don't know if you saw my paper about immune impact of stellate ganglion block. So.

Stelate is what I use to reverse PTSD, right? Sympathetics. So the first time stelate was ever used was in France for asthma. So there is direct connection from stelate ganglia to the bone marrow and the thymus. So it's been used to treat ulcerative colitis symptoms in China. What's interesting there, they measured CRPR. I enter Leukin 6, which is another inflammatory

and they saw a significant drop in interleukin 6. So the point is anxiety and things like that does much more to you than you think. So to me, PTSD potentially can increase cancer load by dysregulating immune system, because the immune system leads to scavenging. Scavenging takes out tumor cells, right? So that's why people kind of go, well, mental health is no big deal. It is a very big deal.

It causes, it increases the chance of heart attack by a factor of two and things like that. So it's no joke.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (32:49.118)
Yeah. And we, I mean, it's definitely, that's definitely consistent with what we say. And with the major depression studies and PTSD studies, when you're accelerating on average, uh, grim age, uh, by two or three years, uh, I mean, you're, you're kind of, you're measuring the blood, you're measuring the immune system. It's a big part of it. And so if you're, if you're, uh, kind of accelerating the, the aging of your immune system,

especially in older people, I mean, most people when they're in their 60s or kind of in their 70s is when they experience an immune system collapse. And so you're just kind of accelerating, you know, like towards that point with people. So I absolutely agree kind of some of these basic steps can really do a lot to slow or prevent people.

from, you know, it can slow the onset of that immune system collapse in older people. So yeah, that's a big kind of aim of the TRIM trials that we're conducting. Okay.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (34:01.2)
I think it's great. Well, anything you can send to me, I would love to read. I'm fascinated by this whole concept. And, you know, I even know I'm a clinician. I kind of, I'm trying to understand all of this stuff. And it's starting to say, make more sense to me. But the ultimate goal is in 2023, we can actually measure things, right? So the more you measure it, you can actually do something based, instead of guessing or this is wisdom. Sometimes wisdom is completely wrong.

Right? A lot of drugs people think are amazing, they're actually not doing anything. Or maybe...

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (34:36.694)
That's right. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, uh, you know, and I, and I missed a little bit of what you said there, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, we, we have these tools available. We have these objective biomarkers. We have other very reliable kind of, uh, ways to track whether a treatment's effective or not. Like let's, uh, and people, people want to get into, uh, you know, people.

It can easily get involved these days. Like you can participate in these studies often from home. I mean, you might visit somewhere to enroll and to get started, but then you're at home most of the time. They can be pretty convenient for people. And so we can tell pretty quickly whether or not a treatment is effective or not. And it's not, we're no longer in this period where people...

just argue for years and years about, you know, this treatment or that treatment and, you know, without any data to support it, right. You know, like, you know, we can cut through a lot of that noise and just do simple studies, do simple, uh, trials pretty quickly. And, and, and no, yeah. So no, with a lot of confidence.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (35:47.845)
No, I don't. So I try to keep our podcast relatively short. But I think it's fascinating. I really appreciate it. I have absolutely loved working with you. And I'm looking forward to publishing. Because what I hope, my hope is, frankly, is the way people always say in the military, at least in US, where the special forces go, the army goes, where army goes, society goes. So wouldn't it be amazing at the end of this study

pretty significantly that with PTSD, you're aging fast. We can actually, so that's something to think about. So stellate, something I do, and I call it SOF method. So we've seen significant improvement of PTSD symptoms clinically, but it's self-report. But you can actually say, you know, it's like before you're three years older than your stated age, your chronological age.

biological age was three years old, but now it's three years younger, that would be, I think, a mind blowing concept because it still hasn't percolated the whole concept that mental health can actually make you age, seem to have escaped people's notice, even though there've been a number of studies showing that the chance of heart attack is twice as high with somebody who's PTSD versus someone who does not have it, right? That's a known fact, but...

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (37:11.019)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. And like, and then what you mentioned, like, you know, results like that can change the conversation. So, I mean, it's, and a lot of people, they don't talk about certain topics because they don't think it can be treated, you know, like the situation can't change it and I mean, like we mentioned the very beginning, changing PTSD to

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (37:37.61)
some path that shows people how to, you know, how to improve it. You know, I think that's, that's kind of critical. Like, like you get the, you know, the, you know, even, um, uh, even studies that with this view as 20 or 30 people, when you can show a profound impact on them, they really can kind of impact the field, uh, and, and the, you know, and, you know, and how medicines practice, you know, and it, and it, uh, yeah. So for me, so yeah, I mean,

You know, it's really exciting to be involved and innovative physicians like you are just so critical and You know and there's You know, so yeah I'm really excited to see kind of what will come with this study and you know and many more to come like You know, so I look forward to working with you into your 90s like you say

Dr. Eugene Lipov (38:29.468)
You know what, we'll talk about the same thing, but we'll get bigger and we'll see. You know what I'd like to have is a chart, like a big chart, how many lives we've saved and how many people made them younger or not ages quickly. Wouldn't that be amazing? What a thing to do.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (38:32.894)
Yep.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (38:47.87)
Yeah, yeah, there's just so, yeah, I mean, there's so many exciting studies to do. And I mean, you can just feel it that so many people want to be involved, you know, either participating in a trial or help coordinating them. You know, I mean, so many people kind of just recognize that we now have these tools that just simply weren't there 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And it's an incredible opportunity.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (39:13.324)
10. It wasn't right. I mean, 10 years ago, nobody was really it was just starting, but it wasn't easily available and you can run them into was hyper expensive. So anyway, I'm going to leave you on that note. I really appreciate you coming. It's pleasure chatting with you. I feel like we've known each other for a bit now, even though it's only been a year. But I think we're going to do some big things.

Robert (Bobby) Brooke (39:39.754)
Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Take care.

Dr. Eugene Lipov (39:41.812)
Thank you, McGrath. Thank you.