Nicklas Brendborg: "Keeping your mouth clean is one of the few easy things you can do to extend your life"

In the early years of the Soviet Union, in the 1920s, the Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov began to experiment with blood transfusions as a method of curing aging.

After surviving the dangers of the revolution and undergoing ten blood transfusions in two years, in 1928, he succumbed to the eleventh.

The donor had malaria and tuberculosis.

Many decades later, in 2015, Elizabeth Parrish, an American and director of a company called BioViva, traveled to Colombia to escape the authorities that regulate the use of medical treatments in her country and apply an anti-aging gene therapy.

Although her approach has not received the approval of the scientific community, Parrish is still alive.

Eternal youth is a prize that has led scientists and adventurers to take exceptional risks.

Right now, there are individuals who apply treatments outside the official circuits to escape the damage of time.

Some drugs, such as rapamycin, which is used to prevent organ rejection in transplants, or metformin, which is taken by many people with diabetes, have shown their anti-aging potential in animals and are beginning to be tested in humans with that objective.

The study of some animals, such as the jellyfish Turritopsis, capable of reversing its own aging and returning, in some way, to its childhood, suggests that getting old is not inescapable and many prestigious scientists believe that we are getting closer to obtaining answers about how live beyond our current limits.

Nicklas Brendborg (Aalborg, Denmark, 27 years old), a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen, has just published a book (

Destiny) in which he collects the latest findings on this immemorial desire of humanity.

He has chatted with EL PAÍS this week by videoconference.

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Ask.

How much time could a person gain by following the advice in your book?

Response.

It depends on who you are.

With some people, it is very easy to give them life-prolonging advice: stop smoking, lose some weight... But there are people who already lead a very healthy life.

There you have to go to the details, to take a supplement or to take better care of your dental health.

In the last hundred years, great increases in life expectancy have been achieved, but now it seems that we have reached a limit, at least for people who do not smoke, do not drink, eat little and exercise, which in any case is not an easy combination to achieve.

Even if you follow all the rules for good health, you're going to get old and you're going to have some age-related disease that kills you.

So if you want to go further, like the Greenland shark [which can live up to 500 years], some kind of medical intervention is going to be necessary.

We will have to develop new drugs to get there.

P.

Compounds such as rapamycin or metformin are now being tested and there are also experiments with stem cells.

Do you think that these solutions will begin to overcome the experimental phases and reach the market in 20 years?

A.

I think it will only take five years for the first products to hit the market.

Indeed, metformin or rapamycin are good candidates and both are currently being tested in humans.

The potential of these molecules is something that we have known about for a long time in mice and now, finally, we are going to see what the verdict is in humans.

That will be a first generation, with these drugs that have already been approved for use in humans.

But then there will be a second generation of substances.

I would say that we are going to see these products coming to market in the next 5 or 10 years if we are pessimistic.

P.

Do you think it will happen as with advanced treatments for rare diseases or cancer, which will be very effective, but with prohibitive prices, and will only reach a few?

A.

It depends on the therapy we are talking about, because some ideas are based on known small molecules that would not be so expensive.

Some cell-based therapies, at first, are going to cost a fortune.

But medicine often goes through a phase where treatments are very expensive and get cheaper as we learn to mass produce them or find alternatives that do the same thing.

When something is found that works to increase life expectancy, there will be a race to lower the price, and since the prize for whoever achieves this goal is huge, there will be a lot of people who will enter the race.

Q.

The world's leading fortunes have shown a lot of interest in the science of delaying aging.

Altos Lab, for example, has raised 3,000 million euros to get started and many of the best scientists specialized in aging in the world. Do you see a dystopian future possible in which there are a thousand millionaires living hundreds of years and the rest of the people with a life expectancy similar to the current one?

R.

I think it will not be impossible to extend life expectancy to 200 or 300 years, something like that, and at first, like anything else, it will be very expensive, and it will be the rich who have access ahead of the poor.

But there will also be many scientists who want to have it for themselves.

And many activists.

I don't expect rich people to develop it and keep it for themselves, that would not be socially acceptable.

At first it will be expensive, but there will be a race to lower the price and find alternatives to make it more accessible to everyone.

I think that is the way we see in all technologies.

What a normal person now has is something that not even kings could have 100 years ago.

Q.

What is the easiest thing to do right now to prolong life?

R.

What is easy, unfortunately, works worse than what is difficult, such as eating healthy or exercising a lot.

But keeping your mouth clean is one of the few easy things you can do to extend your life, by brushing and flossing, because we know the relationship between pathogens in the mouth and cardiovascular disease and dementia.

It is very easy to prevent these bacterial infections by removing the food in which they breed from the mouth.

People with inflammatory disorders of the mouth are at increased risk of thrombi, dementia, and dying earlier, and these risks can be avoided by cleaning two to three minutes a day, brushing your teeth, and flossing.

Being a blood donor could also have a beneficial effect.

We know that there is a very close connection between mental and physical health and also in the other direction

P.

Being small is also a favorable factor to live longer.

Why?

R.

There are two things that can explain it.

The first is that being bigger you have more cells and if we assume that all cells have the potential to become cancerous, that would mean a slightly higher risk of having the disease and it is something that we have observed.

But it's probably not the main reason.

The main reason has to do, surely, with growth signaling, which makes you bigger, but also makes you age faster, because when there is more growth signaling, there is also a decrease in the body's repair.

The body focuses on growth or repair.

Q.

When looking for the keys to eternal life from a scientific point of view, one usually looks, for example, at areas where there is great longevity, such as Okinawa in Japan or Nicoya in Costa Rica.

Then you dissect the characteristics of the way of life, what they eat or what they do, and try to encapsulate those characteristics.

But many times what makes us have a long life, food, places, ways of socializing and others, that only work when they go together.

R.

I have thought a lot about it and it is true.

We know that there is a very close connection between mental and physical health and also in the other direction.

The placebo effect, that thinking something has a medical effect, makes it so, but also the nocebo effect, which is just the opposite.

And this is a problem with food because you can end up hurting yourself if you think too much that something you are taking is bad, you get stressed and feel guilty because you are not feeling a diet.

So yes, you have to take all this into account.

P.

During the 20th century a huge increase in life expectancy was achieved, but in recent years it seems that the trend has slowed down and there are countries like the US where life expectancy has decreased.

Have we reached a ceiling?

R.

I think there are clear signs that the United States is not a very healthy society.

They have a big problem with guns, with drug addictions or the obesity epidemic, and now their life expectancy is falling.

But I don't think that's going to reach other parts of the world.

I don't think it will happen in Spain or Denmark.

We have seen a gradual increase in life expectancy in almost all countries and that is going to continue because we are making improvements in our ways of life and in medicine.

Then we have the great hope of anti-aging drugs.

And there we enter a more speculative field, but I think there will be an exponential increase in life expectancy and we will have people who are alive today dying at 100 or 150 years.

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