45. The 10 Biggest Killers in the U.S.—And the Science of Stopping Them

We often hear about the latest treatments for chronic disease, but what if you could prevent these conditions before they even begin? The truth is, most of the top 10 causes of death are entirely preventable, yet our healthcare system focuses on treating disease rather than stopping it in its tracks. In today's episode of Extend, I'm breaking down the science of preventative medicine, and how you can take control of your health before disease takes control of you. Most chronic diseases don't happen overnight; they develop over years of silent damage. But by understanding early warning signs and risk factors, you can intervene before these conditions ever take hold. We'll explore how cardiovascular disease is the common denominator behind multiple causes of death, including heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. You'll learn why metabolic dysfunction plays a hidden role in everything from diabetes to Alzheimer's. Plus, we'll discuss why early cancer detection is the #1 factor in survival rates, and how improving your immune health can make all the difference. And beyond chronic disease, I'll dive into something most doctors never talk about… accidental injuries. Falls, car accidents, and drug overdoses are responsible for thousands of preventable deaths each year, but small lifestyle adjustments can dramatically reduce your risk. If you're serious about living longer and better, this episode is a must-listen. Prevention is the key to longevity, let's dive in! I also discuss: Preventative Medicine The 10 Leading Causes of Death and Why They're Preventable The Role of Cardiovascular Health in Chronic Disease Early Cancer Detection: The Key to Survival Preventing Accidents & Chronic Diseases Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of Extend, your podcast by me, Dr. Darshan Shah. And today, I'm doing another solosode. Today's solosode is going to be talking about preventative medicine and the science about how you can prevent death and disability from chronic disease. So first, I have to say congratulations to all of you, my listeners, because if you've been listening to this podcast from the very beginning, you know my solosodes have been focusing on the very basics about nutrition, exercise, and movement, and sleep. If you've listened to all of these episodes, you should now have a deep understanding of the top 20% of the information that makes all of the difference in these basics. In discussing nutrition, we tackle the topics of eliminating ultra-processed foods,

• 1:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  how to create an optimal, sustainable relationship with food, and how to make good food choices. How to optimize your metabolic health to prevent diabetes, fatty liver disease, and ultimately, all chronic disease, because they stem from metabolic disease. So, in the topic of movement, we also discussed how sedentary behavior is equivalent to smoking as far as the damage it can do to your health and longevity. We also discussed how to evaluate your current state of fitness and where you want to be for your age. And then we discussed topics like strength training, mobility, and recovery, and how to add these to your workout routine to have an optimal schedule around your workouts and exercise. And then finally, on the topic of sleep, We tackled tracking your sleep, optimizing your sleep environment and routine to get the best sleep of your life.

• 2:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So having a good handle on these basics of health is critical in creating the foundation for optimal health. And I hope you're able to incorporate at least one new habit per episode that will have a compounding benefit for the rest of the year and the rest of your life. So now that we've covered lifestyle medicine, which is those three previous topics that I discussed, we're going to move on to the other major category of medicine that I talk about in my wellness wheel. And this is preventative medicine. We know that if you go on the CDC's website and you look up, what are the top 10 causes of death for all humans living in the Western world? We know that these are preventable. Unfortunately, in our current medical system, we do way too much, way too late, and we end up living in a state of chronic disease for decades and decades.

• 2:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And this creates a slow but predictable decline in function, leading to most of us spending the last 50% of our adult lives dealing with at least one chronic disease and the last 30% of our adult lives in a state of disability. So what if you're able to actually detect the breakdown that disease is going to lead to before it actually happens? Well, we do have the technology today to do just that. When you detect early, you can make early course corrections that completely eliminate the disease process from your future. This field of medicine, which we call preventative medicine, is sadly missing from most of our lives. But by taking control of your own health destiny, you can avoid all disease. You just don't have to outsource this part of medicine to the healthcare system that we have right now. You have to do it yourself.

• 3:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Even the ones that you might think are genetically inclined to develop diseases like Alzheimer's, these are all preventable. You just need to detect them early and make changes early. So over the next few weeks of episodes, we're going to cover heart health, brain health, and immune health. Your immune system being critical in your fight against cancer, chronic diseases, because if you can't fight infections, usually an infection can lead to your demise later on in life, which happens to many people when they pass away. So let's take a closer look at the CDC's list of top 10 reasons people died in 2023. Number one was heart disease. Two thousand people died of heart disease. We know that heart disease is a major cause of death for both men and women. And now we're seeing heart disease occur earlier and earlier in younger people

• 4:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and cause heart attacks even younger in life. Now, when I talk about heart disease, I like to refer not just as heart disease, because it's really a disease of your blood vessels as well. So I'm going to be talking a lot about cardiovascular disease. Because if you look at cardiovascular disease as a whole, that is a disease of your blood vessels and your heart. You can see it leads to many more of the top 10 causes of death, including nephritis or nephrotic syndrome. This is a disease of your kidney, which is number nine. And also could lead to death from number five on the list, which is stroke or cerebral vascular accidents. This is a blockage of a blood vessel in your brain. Vascular disease also has a major role in Alzheimer's disease, believe it or not, which is also on the list. And finally, liver disease as well, which is number 10 on the list.

• 5:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So you can see that cardiovascular disease contributes to many of the chronic diseases that are on the list of top 10 causes of death. So it's really important that we tackle it and we have a good understanding of how you can prevent this in your life. Next is cancer on the list at number two, leading to 600,000 deaths across the United States per year. Cancer is a very complex topic, but I'm going to just drill down to how cancer interacts with your immune system. Our immune system is primarily responsible for protecting us from cancer, detecting it early and eliminating it from our body. Unfortunately, as we age, our immune system weakens. This is a process called immunosynesthesia. And so we really want to focus on not just keeping your immune system healthy, but detecting cancer early as well.

• 5:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed as stage one. At stage one, cancer is potentially curable. Whereas in stage three or four, we're talking about five-year survival rates. So we're going to do a lot of talk around cancer and what you can do using newer modalities to detect it early. Number four on the list back in 2023 was COVID-19. Although this is becoming lower and lower on the death rate risk scale, it's still something that we should talk about because it's about how your immune system is affected by things such as viruses and also the vaccines that we take to potentially prevent these diseases, which might be actually causing some more harm than good for some of these problems such as COVID-19. Number seven on the list is Alzheimer's disease.

• 6:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  About 120,000 people will die of Alzheimer's disease this year. And this number is increasing every single year. Alzheimer's disease affects women more than men. And approximately 11% of Americans aged 65 or older have Alzheimer's disease that is diagnosed. I potentially think this number could actually be much higher because many people aren't diagnosed and they're just living with it. And there's other forms of neurodegenerative disease that don't fall into the bucket of Alzheimer's disease that are also affecting people's cognition. What's particularly bad about Alzheimer's and these other neurodegenerative diseases is that they often take years and years and years of disability before someone actually passes away from them. So people spend a long time with a reduced health span.

• 7:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We're going to talk about early detection techniques and how to prevent and insulate your brain against neurodegenerative disease over a few episodes in the future. Lastly, number eight on the list is diabetes and number 10 is liver disease and cirrhosis. These are all fall under the category for me of metabolic disease. Now, we did address metabolic disease when we talked about nutrition, also exercise and sleep in the first few solosodes. However, we're going to be talking about them as a common theme throughout all of the future episodes because metabolic disease and inflammation play a root cause in all of the chronic diseases on this top 10 list from the CDC. So we do have a lot to cover over the next few solosodes on all of these topics. But I do want to highlight in this introductory solosode, one topic that is very much ignored

• 8:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  in medicine, which is the topic of accidental death. Rarely does your doctor talk to you about safety, but I think it's an important part of the whole conversation of longevity to talk about safety and how accidental deaths are becoming more frequent as time goes on. It's important to note that after 65, accidental deaths are the most Of the injury related deaths. However, under the age of forty, most of the injury related deaths come from homicides and suicides. Mental health and how metabolism leads to mental health disturbances is a topic that we've covered in a few episodes here, especially the one with Dr. Chris Palmer, which you should definitely listen to if you have not heard it. It's a really good one. And we will be covering mental health in future episodes as well. However, for this particular episode, I'm just going to stick to accidental deaths because I want

• 8:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  to be able to impart some information that I think could be very useful. So when you look at accidental deaths, we have about 227,000 deaths a year from accidents overall. So it's number three on the list of CDC's top 10 causes of death. Now, out of these 44,000 are falls and another 44,000 are due to motor vehicle accidents. And then 100,000 of these are due to unintentional poisoning death. And unintentional poisoning death really just covers drug overdoses. These drug overdose deaths are mainly from opioids. And now we know a lot about fentanyl being added to recreational drugs, creating many of these accidental drug overdoses. And also, obviously, drug addiction is a big problem.

• 9:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  People getting an overdose of the actual drug that they're taking, whether or not it's mixed with fentanyl is a major problem in our country. Hopefully, you don't use many recreational drugs at all. But if you do, what I can tell you, one thing that is extremely important is to buy fentanyl test strips from the local pharmacy and test anything that you get from anyone, anywhere. You want to make sure you're testing it yourself for fentanyl. So you don't have a tragic death from a recreational experience. Now, obviously, I'm not a proponent of using recreational drugs. I don't use any myself, but definitely if you're going to use them, test them yourself. Secondly, let's talk about motor vehicle traffic deaths. So most of these occur to the driver and many of them are still occurring, believe it or not,

• 10:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  for people not wearing seatbelts. So definitely, if you're a driver of a vehicle, driving intoxicated, obviously, is not a good idea. That's what leads to most of these deaths. But also, wear your seatbelts. Seatbelts have dramatically reduced deaths from motor vehicle accidents. It should go without Out saying to wear your seatbelt. And then secondly, don't drive while distracted. The text messaging and driving is a major problem. It's created many sad stories, especially in teenagers that are driving and texting at the same time, either dying in their own motor vehicle accident or killing somebody else. So a lot of education needs to be done around texting and driving and wearing seatbelts still,

• 10:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  believe it or not. Please make sure that's part of your protocol whenever you get into a motor vehicle. Lastly, let's address the unintentional falls. So this happens mainly in men and women that are over 65 years of age. Men have a much higher rate of unintentional falls than women do, with white adult males having by far the most unintentional fall deaths. When you look at the death rates from falls. Emergency rooms treat over 2 million falls a year, believe it or not. And I remember seeing many falls in the emergency room. They often lead to broken hips or shoulders in elderly individuals. And this leads to a slow, steady demise, including problems such as pneumonias and/or ulcers from laying around in one spot too long,

• 11:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and just an acceleration of Alzheimer's disease and neurodegenerative disease. So it is incredibly important to protect against falls as we age. Most of these falls are due to a combination of difficulties in seeing, balance while walking, and medication effects. Prescription medications can often cause low blood pressure, changes in balance. And so these need to be very closely monitored. Visual disturbances, especially after the age of 55 to 60, need to be addressed promptly by an ophthalmologist, of course, or an optometrist. They can get you a good pair of glasses or surgery if you need it for cataracts. Cataracts are often ignored for way too long and they lead to motor vehicle accidents and also falls. And lastly, the issue of balance.

• 12:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Now, as we age, we generally become less and less balanced and we also have less and less mobility. Now, we talked about this on the solo soda mobility, but I think it's important to highlight again that maintaining balance is a key part of your workout, exercise, routine, whatever you want to call it on a daily basis. The star rats who I had on This podcast, they're huge advocates of maintaining balance and they do little tricks throughout their house, such as in the morning when they brush their teeth, they do it on one leg, or they try to put their shoes and socks on while standing and balancing on one foot. All of these techniques can help you maintain balance over the long run. If you have a trainer and you're going to the gym and you're over the age of 40, make sure you start adding balance

• 13:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and mobility routine to your gym workout and even sooner if at all possible. If you work out at home, make sure you're looking up some mobility and balance routines that you can also add to your workout program. You want to track these, just like you're tracking sets of your bench press, for example, you want to track the number of sets and time that you spend on balance and also mobility work. It is really that important for preventing falls. So I'm a big believer of talking to my patients about this entire category of the top 10 causes of death. I think it's incredibly important to note that these causes of death mainly come from chronic diseases and accidents, both of which can be extremely preventable as long as you bring this to the forefront of your mind. This episode is mainly about injury prevention, which is extremely

• 13:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  important, but in the next few solos, we're going to go over heart and cardiovascular disease, which will give you a really good framework for how to protect your heart from a heart attack and also your vascular system from causing damage to every single organ in your body. If you found this episode helpful and you're looking forward to the next few episodes on preventative health and preventative medicine, make sure that you're bookmarking this podcast and also sending it to a friend or a family member that you think would benefit from these techniques to live a little longer. Thank you for joining the Extend Podcast.

• 14:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps us support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.