Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging

Alan A. Cohen, PhD @ Columbia | Rethinking Health and Aging I Chair in Biological Complexity and Healthy Longevity

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

What if aging is not a single program?

What if health is not just “the absence of disease but rather the capacity to maintain dynamic equilibrium.

A thread on why we need a science of health, not just a science of breakdown.
#ScienceOfHealth #Aging

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

@davidasinclair Interesting paper.
Calling heat therapy “exercise-like” is interesting, makes me think:

It’s not the intervention itself that matters most, but the adaptive response it triggers.

We can have many different inputs, similar system-level effects.

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

What appears to be amazing symptom alleviation could in fact be killing us.
I had a lot of fun writing this substack post with @MitoPsychoBio on the risks of trying to meddle with the body's internal homeostatic mechanisms - in this case, the ability to detect energy shortages and make rationing decisions.
https://t.co/gxvyxnupHR

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

Here I’ll share work on rethinking health and aging, evolution, complex system and building a real science of health.

If you are interested in health, longevity, medicine, or the limits of reductionism, follow along.

We may need to rethink the whole frame.
#HealthyLongevity #DynamicEquilibrium

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

What if aging is not a single program?

What if health is not just “the absence of disease but rather the capacity to maintain dynamic equilibrium.

A thread on why we need a science of health, not just a science of breakdown.
#ScienceOfHealth #Aging

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

This points to a core problem in modern medicine and longevity culture:

it treats the body like a machine to optimize,
instead of a living system to understand.

More inputs. More tweaking. More control.
Neglecting the complex system.

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

@mkaeberlein Really interesting result. Maybe that’s because health is not a mountain to climb by optimizing one thing after another, but a plateau to remain on. The biggest benefits may come less from reaching the exact center than from avoiding the cliff.

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

@mkaeberlein @UAZPharmacy Looking forward to the rapamycin discussion in Tucson key to separating what we know from hype. In rethinking health and aging, dosing/timing often interacts with individual biology in ways that deserve more attention.

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

@mkaeberlein Your bracket highlights how systems-level prevention can rival single-factor wins. In my work rethinking aging trajectories, population variability suggests early risk management might amplify metabolic gains even more. Curious how you'd weight individual heterogeneity here?

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

Each cytokine plays many roles, and the overall patterns lead to a physiological response. We can't interpret them one at a time, out of context.

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

Inflammation isn't always bad. In our amazing new study in @NatureAging, we show that inflammaging does not exist in the typical way in two indigenous populations. It doesn't increase with age and doesn't predict chronic disease at all. #Inflammation https://t.co/9AJt8kHeh4

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

This challenges the assumption that the basic biology of aging is universal. Physiology is malleable and learns from our environment. Inflammation is a stress response system, and Tsimane don't have the same stressors we do.

[Science of Health | Columbia University @cusciofhealth]

Too much competition in science leads to over-optimizing the metrics of success (publications, funding, etc.) at the expense of actual good science. It's Goodhart's law. Here's a post I wrote on it before I heard of Goodhart's law: https://t.co/JJWkNmya7t

[Martin Picard @MitoPsychoBio]

Can we feel our mitochondria?

We feel pain (nociception), internal sensations (interoception), and even our immune system (immunoception)

How does the brain monitor our energy status?

In this preprint, we propose that the brain feels the balance of energy demand (burn rate) and energy transformation capacity (mitochondrial OxPhos capacity) via mitoception

Cellular studies, animal models, clinical, and human studies suggest that the cytokine GDF15 is the main signal of mitoception

Preprint by Cynthia Liu and colleagues
@torwager @LFeldmanBarrett @Danbelsky @Dr_Epel @cohenaginglab

https://t.co/g2QjJFLmeW
Comments welcome!

[Alan A. Cohen, PHD I Rethinking Health and Aging @cohenaginglab]

Impressive innovation, but we should ask if it helps us break the cycle or just feeds it in disguise. The harder work is still behavioral change.

[Science of Health | Columbia University @cusciofhealth]

While this is cool work, the last thing we need is more ways to fake giving ourselves a sugar fix. Rather, we need to train ourselves away from sugar addiction and other societal and technological shortcuts to dopamine. https://t.co/PI11XHtKsz