How ‘Super Agers’ Stay Sharp And Active Longer Than Their Peers

Super agers are folks who stay fit into their 80s and beyond. What’s behind their unique health and longevity?

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

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:31Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:37Flora Lichtman?

  Today in the podcast, what does it take to make it to 80, 90, even 100 years old without slowing down? Researchers are studying these older achievers. What can we learn from them?

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Most people that I know can think of an aunt, uncle, neighbor, or friend who is thriving, say, oh, you'd never believe they're 80 years old. They're running circles around me.

• 1:02Ira Flatow?

  We're going to talk about superagers. Superagers are those rare seniors who get to old age, but somehow they stay young, just like the Golden Girls did. And no cognitive decline for this group, no napping away the golden years. I had one in my family.

• 1:19Flora Lichtman?

  I, can I cut in?

• 1:20Ira Flatow?

  Yes.

• 1:20Flora Lichtman?

  I would like to hear about your superager. Can we honor her?

• 1:23Ira Flatow?

  My mother, who lived to 99 plus, and she never considered herself to be old. She used to say, well, you know, all these old people around me, I don't feel old. And I remember being with her in the drugstore at the card counter where she was arguing with the clerk because they didn't have a card for her Scrabble player buddy who was 102.

• 1:47Flora Lichtman?

  Another superager.

• 1:48Ira Flatow?

  And you have one in your family, right?

• 1:50Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, my grandmother, Flora Senior, lived to 100, was completely with it all the way, out reading, out doing, out holding court till the very end, and an inspiration. If I inherit like 1% of her genes, I would be grateful.

• 2:07Ira Flatow?

  I'm with you on this. And because of all of this, I Scientists are studying these selected seniors to figure out what's so special about them. Is it the genes? Is it some, are they just lucky? Is there some attitude? And what lessons can we mortals learn? So maybe we can be super agers too. And joining us now, my first guest to talk about it is Eric Topol. He's a cardiologist, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He has a new book just out called, believe it or not, Superagers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity. Welcome back to Science Friday, Eric.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Great to be with you, Ira.

• 2:46Ira Flatow?

  Very nice to have you. Let's, let's talk about super agers. Why did you write this book?

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Well, we've been studying it for a long time. We had done the first whole genome sequence of 1,400 of these folks. They had to be over age 85. They ranged up to age 102, and they couldn't have had any chronic illness or on any medication. So they're hard to find. And what we learned, very different from both of you that have this in your family pattern, is that most of these people did not have it in their genes. In fact, the patient of mine who I present in the book, Lee Rochal, she's 98, and all her relatives, her parents, her brothers, died in their 50s and 60s. That's more likely the pattern.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  So the book is really to put out what do we know about super agers? And how are we going to have many more super agers in the years ahead?

• 3:43Flora Lichtman?

  Well, what does tie these folks together? Was there a pattern?

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Well, the pattern is that the lifestyle factors, for the most part, not, you know, with some exceptions, are very favorable. So, you know, we can review those, but of course, they transcend diet and exercise and sleep. But the other things, of course, are, and Ira mentioned this, their attitude, their purpose, their sense of, of their own social engagements. They're often, you know, frequently

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Out in nature, they have, they're very active people. In fact, what was the thing that was so funny when we were recruiting this cohort? Is that we had a hard time getting a hold of them because they had so many appointments. They were keeping so busy. So they're overall a very sunny disposition, which is really interesting.

• 4:40Ira Flatow?

  That's interesting.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  And they're, you know, tend to be on the thinner side. So those were the features that we did see in common. And it was very little that we could find in their DNA. There does appear to be something that does explain this, not in their DNA, that's biologic. And that's their immune system. Everything points to a very resilient, high integrity immune system. That doesn't suffer the usual immunosenescence as we age.

• 5:10Ira Flatow?

  Well, would that not be part of your DNA, your immune system?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, because you don't see, yeah, Ira, great point. You don't see that when you just look at the genome sequence. You have to do testing, looking at the B cells, the T cells, antibodies. So it just doesn't show up in a sequence. It's something you have to actually go after with specific testing.

• 5:32Flora Lichtman?

  And is it that their immune system, they don't have as much inflammation? What does a good immune system look like?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great point. So they don't, their tendency is not to have untoward inflammation. They also are very good at, for example, fighting cancer cells. Now, we know it's very hard to get cancer, particularly for it to spread. If your immune system is, is on high alert. And that's, you know, one way the immune system kicks in. The other is that for atherosclerosis, the basis of cardiovascular disease and for Alzheimer's, it's really that you're having untoward excessive immune response. In the case of the artery wall for atherosclerosis, or in response to the misfolded proteins,

• 6:20Speaker 04

  like amyloid and tau that can accumulate in the brain. So you just, it's kind of like a Goldilocks. You want to have just the right amount of immune response. For the right conditions and the super agers seem to have that. That there that's a particularly great difference of those folks as compared to the elderly. Right. Which are the most people, most people as we get beyond 60, we have one of these diseases and we're the elderly, we want to flip that and get to the welderly.

• 6:52Ira Flatow?

  Hmm.

• 6:53Flora Lichtman?

  We have another guest to add to the conversation. Emily Rogalski is a clinical and cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's Research Care Center. She's at the University of Chicago. Emily, welcome to Science Friday.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:07Flora Lichtman?

  Emily, how do you define a superager?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  So, super aging is a definition that we defined for research purposes about 15 years ago as individuals who are over age 80 but have memory performance at least as good as individuals in their 50s and 60s. So, individuals who are older but have youthful memory performance.

• 7:32Flora Lichtman?

  Is it normal for for for people to have some memory decline? I mean, sort of how unusual is that, I guess?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if we think about really our our old thinking of what happened when we age dates back to this idea that we thought that individuals just get old and they get senile and that was the only trajectory of aging. And luckily, we got more sophisticated understanding that neurodegenerative disease or Alzheimer's disease and dementia are an abnormal part of aging. However, along with that came this idea that there's still this normal trajectory of aging and with it is associated cognitive decline. It doesn't interfere with our daily living activities, however, there is still this idea

• 8:21Speaker 03

  that cognitive decline as we age is inevitable. And while that might be true on average, the idea of super aging really brought to light our true lived experience where most people that I know can think of an aunt, uncle, neighbor, or friend who is

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Thriving in their eighties and beyond and they'd say, "Oh, you'd never believe they're 80 years old. They're running circles around me." And so this idea that individuals can be over age 80 and have really youthful memory performance was something we wanted to quantify. It was really absent in the scientific literature at the time.

• 8:57Ira Flatow?

  Well, we have a few of those folks on the line here, maybe somebody's aunt, uncle, neighbor, or friend. Katie in Ohio, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Tell us what's on your mind.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  Well, you asked for people who are super agers to call you, and so I did. I'm 94. I ran, my husband and I started being at Grand Ylne Falls in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park 37 years ago, and we rehabilitated the house. And I ran it until two years ago. And some nice people made an offer I couldn't refuse and take over my job at the end, but I could stay in my room here, so I still live here.

• 9:39Ira Flatow?

  Do you have a secret to your, do you have a secret to your super aging?

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Well, I think running the end probably helped because I had to keep going and solving problems. And we eat very healthfully, and we served a healthy breakfast, too. He baked all of our bread.

• 9:59Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  So I think, I think it's a combination of that, and I think I'm just probably plain lucky because I, I'm not on any prescription medications.

• 10:10Ira Flatow?

  That is...

• 10:10Speaker 05

  I feel great.

• 10:12Ira Flatow?

  That's great to hear.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  I also am writing a book, and I just enrolled at Kent State as a freshman.

• 10:20Ira Flatow?

  You're a super duper ager. Eric, what do you think of that? Thank you, Katie, for calling.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Katie's the prototype, Ira. I mean, that's exactly what we found. Wasn't in the genes as much as it is in her, as she described herself. Just a classic. I mean, that's the patient I present in the book of one of two that I feature. Just like her, but 98, remarkably crisp, like Emily was saying, in terms of memory. I mean, I knew something was going on because I asked her how she got to the appointment and first time I met her and she, of course, she drove. But they're busy, they're doing so many different things, and Katie is just right spot on.

• 11:01Ira Flatow?

  Katie didn't mention anything about arthritis. Is that, can you be a superager and get something chronic like arthritis?

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Oh, sure. No, I think the main thing is the big three, neurodegenerative cancer and cardiovascular. But no, these people, they're going to have some arthritis, some have glaucoma, you know, things like that, but they just don't have the serious, life-threatening diseases. Yeah.

• 11:27Flora Lichtman?

  Emily, do you look at the brains of superagers? And if so, do they look different from other aging brains?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We actually are able to quantify the health of the brain or the youthfulness of the brain from a few different vantage points. When participants enroll into the study, we say they're with us from life and beyond because we ask them to enroll and come back over time and then eventually donate their brain at the time of death if they're willing to. And that's really a generous gift, the most generous gift they can give, because we're able to look at cellular and molecular factors that we just can't look at typically during life. During life, we can measure with MRI scans or PET scans, so we can quantify the thickness of the outer layer of the brain. You can kind of think of that like the bark on the tree.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And when we do that in superagers, we see that they are able to retain the thickness that's similar to a 50 to 60-year-old, with one exception. They actually have a region in the anterior cingulate that's thicker in the superagers than it is in the 50 to 60-year-olds. So that region is incredibly important for attention, and attention supports memory. And it gave us one clue of what to look at under the microscope. For when individuals donated their brain, and when we did that, we saw that they have a special type of cells called voniconne mode neurons, these brain cells that are more abundant in the special region of the anterior cingulate.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  And that those cells are thought to be important for social engagement and social function.

• 13:09Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  And we also see that in general, the cells, their neurons in the memory regions of the brain tend to be larger, not necessarily more numerous, but larger or plumper. And so, these are the start of measures that we're starting to understand superagers being more healthy from a brain standpoint.

• 13:31Ira Flatow?

  Well, from a brain standpoint, when you do these biopsies postmortem, do you ever see superagers with the symptoms of Alzheimer's, with the tangles, that has not affected their lives?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a great question. And for some individuals, we do see some of that pathology. So Alzheimer's pathology is generally expected to be there in a lesser amount in individuals who are over age 80. You may see some of those plaques and tangles. We have really a few different pathways that we see in superagers. One is those that seem to be resistant to the formation of these bad proteins accumulating in their brain, so they don't have that Alzheimer's pathology, when we would expect a little bit of it to be there. And then there are other individuals who do have that Alzheimer's pathology in their

• 14:27Speaker 03

  brain, but it doesn't seem to be having the same effect that we would expect. They're not experiencing that change in cognition. In fact, their memory is really great.

• 14:36Flora Lichtman?

  Let's go to the phones. George in Brooklyn, New York, welcome to Science Friday.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  I'm considering myself at the beginning of being a superager. I'm 85, and I feel like I'm in my 60s. I just came from a trip with 19 other drivers and cars.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Two thousand miles in five days. And one of them was a place called The Tail of the Dragon, which has thirty-two miles in four hundred and thirty turns.

• 15:09Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  And everyone's driving, everyone's driving fast. And that was only part of the trip. That took maybe half a day.

• 15:17Ira Flatow?

  Were you all super aging? Were you all super agers here in your trip?

• 15:21Speaker 06

  Uh, no, I was the oldest person there. Everybody would say, God, how can you, how can you do this? You're, you're, you're eighty-five. You're amazing. And I said, well, I've always had a passion for driving. I also do salsa dancing, and which is a very intricate thing to do, but there are a lot of turns and whatever.

• 15:42Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  So, um, the only thing I have trouble with is, I think, is remembering names. And that's always been an issue with me. I don't think I put enough effort into it, you know?

• 15:54Ira Flatow?

  I've had that since forty, so, yeah, I get it. Thanks, thanks, George, for sharing that with us. Eric, these people are just amazing.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  They really are. And one of the really striking things he mentioned about dancing, but, you know, physical activity, when it was compared to the SSRI antidepressant drugs, which are commonly used, physical activity outdid drugs by a big margin for relieving depression and, of course, symptoms, improving mental health. And as you know, that's a big interaction between physical health. So each time you talk to a folk, a person eighty-five and beyond who fulfills this criteria, super aging, you learn about things that are common in this group. It's a fascinating group, and I do think we're going to see a lot more of them in the future because of the tools that we have right now.

• 16:50Flora Lichtman?

  After the break, why it is important to invest in your social life in your later years.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Our brains love to learn new things, and our social connections give us that opportunity to engage in complex conversations that keep our brain active.

• 17:06Flora Lichtman?

  Stay with us.

• 17:14Speaker 01

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• 18:44Speaker 01

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• 18:58Ira Flatow?

  Is there a time in a superager's life when you can tell they're going to be a superager?

• 19:05Speaker 04

  That's a great question, Ira. I think we're going to be able to do that with multimodal AI, with all the persons, billions of data points, and some that we hopefully will get a chance to discuss. But otherwise, it's pretty hard to do that right now. You're certainly not going to be able to predict it from a family history.

• 19:24Ira Flatow?

  And Emily, you agree?

• 19:25Speaker 03

  I would have to agree that I think that's the goal is to try to understand not only who is likely to be a superager in the future, but how do we help others be more likely to be on that trajectory? So, how do we help individuals live long and live well, not just extending their health, their lifespan, but also matching their health span? And one of the reasons that we are conducting a multidisciplinary and multi-site study is to help fill in some of those data and gaps around the factors that are key to doing that.

• 19:58Flora Lichtman?

  Well, this is what I was going to ask. I mean, are there interventions that people should do in midlife? For example, asking for myself to increase your likelihood of becoming a superager, of aging well?

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Well, Flora, I think firstly, we do know ways to prevent these three age-related diseases, eighty to ninety percent from lifestyle and risk factors for cardiovascular, and forty to fifty percent for Alzheimer's neurodegenerative diseases, and also for cancer. So, building on that, we have specific ways to prevent these diseases now that not enough people are taking advantage of. So, for example, the story for Alzheimer's disease, if you have a family history, you may have an APOE4 allele, which is a risk factor. You can have a polygenic risk score for Alzheimer's, and then you can also get a PTau217, and

• 20:54Speaker 04

  there are other of these protein markers. Soon, there'll be a brain organ clock, and we can talk more about clocks. There's many layers of data that would establish risk. Alzheimer's, even mild cognitive impairment, takes twenty years or longer to develop. So, we have lots of years of runway to get ahead of this. And what's also exciting is that these protein markers, like PTau217, are very responsive to exercise and lifestyle factors. So, they not only help to establish risk way in advance, but they give us a way to know whether the prevention is working. So, we're in a whole new time right now.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  To work on building on preventive capabilities for the three big age-related diseases.

• 21:40Flora Lichtman?

  Well, so what's the prescription? Exercise? What else?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  The prescription, you know, for all people, that doesn't work too well. We don't get this adoption of the perfect lifestyle. But when you have a person's risk stratified and you say, well, you're at high risk, that's when you get adoption of exercise, not just, of course, aerobic, but balance and strength training. That's when you get people attentive to sleep health, particularly getting, you know, more deep sleep and regularity of their sleep, and also their nutrition in terms of the optimal diet and other factors beyond that. So you intervene with lifestyle, your success for people adopting that

• 22:24Speaker 04

  is when you are working with a specific, particularized risk.

• 22:29Ira Flatow?

  Let's go to the phones to Melissa in Jupiter, Florida. Hi, Melissa.

• 22:33Speaker 05

  Hello there. How are you?

• 22:35Ira Flatow?

  Fine. Go ahead, please.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  So I live in Jupiter. My neighbor Eloise is 96 years old. She turned 96 on May 1st. She is my cocktail buddy. She's my Energizer bunny. She is amazing and I adore her and I just love having her in my life at 96 years old.

• 22:54Flora Lichtman?

  Everyone needs a cocktail buddy.

• 22:56Ira Flatow?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  As a matter of fact, I'm...

• 23:00Ira Flatow?

  Does she have a secret for her longevity and staying healthy?

• 23:04Speaker 05

  You know, one of the things that she always says, you know what? I don't care. That's all I gotta say is I don't, either I don't care, and she also says, my only job is to be God's child. And so she lives this beautiful life. She lives alone. She still drives. She needle planes and she's just a lovely, lovely person and I am so fortunate to have her in my world.

• 23:28Ira Flatow?

  You are lucky. Thank you for sharing that with us and good luck to you and your neighbor. Let me ask this question of both of you, because as we get older, and I know this in myself as I've gotten older, a lot of the tests, it could be a colonoscopy, it could be something, my doctors tell me I don't get them anymore. I mean, because perhaps it's more dangerous for me to get a test than it is outliving the test. Yet if we're going to be super agers, some of us, and live to 100 and have, let's say, 25, 35 more years, shouldn't I be getting these tests? Emily, what do you think?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I do think we need to, you know, understand what is the risk versus the benefit of a procedure and how might it help. But it's also contextualized in this idea of aging stigma and the expectation of how we're going to age. And aging stigma is a real challenge. Super agers really bring this great opportunity to change the expectations and stigma around aging, reminding us that individuals, when they reach a certain age, there is still more to give. We can learn from them from a wisdom standpoint, and they can contribute actively in society. And sometimes we stick a label such as age and then say, oh, we're not doing that because

• 24:51Speaker 03

  you're over age, whatever.

• 24:53Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, that's happened to me, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  I was just going to say, Ira, that it's really not the right idea to just use age as a criterion for either doing tests or abandoning tests as we get older. It really should be defined by the person's risk. So if you do have a risk for colon cancer, that can be established multiple ways, that should be going on throughout one's life. But this whole idea that we should only do mass screening of mammography or colonoscopy by a certain age, this is really, we're much smarter than that. And we waste so much money, and we also abandon seniors later in their life when we should be still keeping them under surveillance.

• 25:34Ira Flatow?

  But do we have enough gerontologists around? People who know about these issues, not just your family doctor, but people who can take care of you when you get to that over 80 age?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  We certainly don't, and we also, of course, our medical community isn't well set up for caring for people in their 80s and beyond, especially making the call like you just had, should I have one of these tests? So, no, we're not well positioned, and we're also not keeping up with how the advances in research are taking us.

• 26:11Flora Lichtman?

  Emily, what role does stress play in aging? If someone has a lot of trauma in their life, do they age faster?

• 26:19Speaker 03

  We certainly know that not only in aging, but really at any standpoint in your life, chronic stress is not good for you. They result in, can result in changes in the volume of your brain, there are chemical changes that accompany it, and so it's something to pay very close attention to. That said, the super agers in our research haven't necessarily lived lives that are free of stress. We have individuals who have encountered tremendous stress in their life, some who have lost children at a young age, others who have been the only survivor of their family from concentration camps.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  So there's been really tremendous stress that they've encountered, but they've been resilient to it. And so, starting to understand one's attitude and your resilience to these things is certainly a key area to focus on, because we know it's important to brain health, but also general health.

• 27:19Ira Flatow?

  I have a little tidbit that I've been wondering about for years, because years ago, when I was in my 34th years, I've talked to a lot of gerontologists on this program. And I remember one of them telling me, when you get old, it's more difficult to get from 70 to 80 than it is from 80 to 90. Is that true? I mean, do you find that in your research, Eric?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  It is true that once you get to 80, your chances of moving on in your years and staying healthy is higher, for sure. So it's borne out by the data, yes.

• 27:53Ira Flatow?

  Is socializing, Eric and Emily, is that important, the happiness and the joy and meeting with other people for longevity?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  That has been one of the key features that we have seen, is really that the super agers endorse this strong social connection with others. This is information that's come to us initially by participants filling out survey data, and we're now in the process of quantifying this. So we ask super agers to wear wearable sensors in their daily life so that we can understand their social connections with others and how that is playing such a significant role. And social connection, I think, has other brain benefit, too, because when we think about the negative consequences of loneliness and social isolation, which

• 28:40Speaker 03

  is a huge problem in aging, the social connection also helps to keep us on our toes. Our brains love to learn new things, and our social connections give us that opportunity to engage in complex conversations that keep our brain active.

• 28:56Flora Lichtman?

  Eric, how should we think about these efforts to reverse aging? Is there anything to that?

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Well, there's a lot of work being done and a lot of investment by billionaires and others. When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they're rich, they want to be young. But the problem we have, Flora, is that there's some great science being done and many, many companies that are trying to reverse aging, and many of these approaches look very good in mice, even rodents in general. But we have no data in humans, and there's certainly some risks that are involved and certainly a lack of proof. So I think what's really exciting right now is that the metrics of aging, which is an outgrowth of this science, like this bodywide clock, organ clocks, all these protein

• 29:45Speaker 04

  markers, things that Emily has been discussing with respect to what we see in brain imaging, the science of aging has just jumped forward so much. That is what's enabling us to cultivate, nurture the super agers of the future.

• 30:02Ira Flatow?

  Is there enough research? Have the cutbacks in the federal government, Eric?

• 30:06Speaker 04

  No, that's the problem. Here we are at this most propitious moment in medical history, and we're seeing this massive cutbacks in resources and grants and, you know, people at the agencies at NIH and others. So it's really a total mismatch.

• 30:23Flora Lichtman?

  Emily?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  I couldn't agree more. The reason that a lot of this progress has been made is thanks in large part to things like the National Alzheimer's Project Act, which was signed into law, you know, more than 10 years ago, which changed the landscape of our investment in aging and dementia research. And prior to that, we had so little funding, there couldn't be much diversity in the targets that we were looking at. Thanks to that influx of funding, we now have some FDA-approved treatments. They're not the last line, and they're not the panacea for all, but we were making great strides. And we stand to... There's a lot of threat right now, based on the cuts that are proposed.

• 31:06Flora Lichtman?

  Emily and Eric, are you... Are either of you recruiting people, super agers for your studies? We have a lot listening, obviously. How should they... Can they get involved? Should they get involved?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  We would love for them to get involved. We're recruiting across the US and Canada. They can reach us by either calling or reaching out on our website at h-a-a-r-c dot center dot UChicago dot edu.

• 31:35Ira Flatow?

  Say that one more time.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  So it's h-a-a-r-c dot center dot UChicago dot edu. So H-A-A-R-C dot center dot UChicago dot edu.

• 31:52Flora Lichtman?

  You need a short link, Emily.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  I know.

• 31:55Ira Flatow?

  Eric, what's in the future for you in this research?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Well, I think our efforts are to this use of AI to assemble, integrate all of a person's data, these layers of data that we've been talking about. And what's so extraordinary now is that it used to be we could say you're at risk, but we couldn't say when in your life. And now everything's changed. We are much better at forecasting whether a person is at high risk, but also when.

• 32:25Ira Flatow?

  Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Emily Rogowski and Eric Topol, thank you for your work and for joining us today.

• 32:37Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us if you like the show. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode was produced by Annette Heist. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.