Cell Signaling and Healthy Aging

by Barbara Brewitt, Ph.D.

Healthy aging is of interest for 76 million Baby Boomers who are approaching retirement and who desire to age with grace and health. As consumers, born between 1946 and 1964, they seek to increase health quality, endurance and longevity without side effects. The key in aging successfully is to adapt to a formidable and sometimes hostile environment. The predicted lifespan today is 75-85 years and there are more people living to 100 years or older than ever before.

Prescription Drugs Offer Little Support For Healthy Aging
Medically, however little improves the health and vitality of people living into their senior years. In past centuries, life expectancy was rarely above forty-five years old. Improved pediatric care plus better living conditions enabled more children to live beyond infancy, thus increases the number of people who live into older age. By simply living longer, robust health deteriorates presenting most senior citizens with psychological and environmental stressors they do not adapt to well. Our culture has not previously had to cope with this visible aging population and the medical needs of seniors are only beginning to get the attention given to the medical care of infants. In general, the medical community is ill-prepared to provide effective health care to people living into their senior years. Complications from drug toxicity are too common in this vulnerable population of seniors.

Chronic diseases and degenerative conditions play the major role in death today. Quality of life, drug costs and drug toxicity are significant concerns for this first group to experience longevity - the parent’s of Boomer’s. Prescribed drugs contribute to higher rates of non-fatal disorders. The Institute of Medicine reports that senior citizen takes at least six prescriptions daily without knowing their interactions. Use of prescription drugs is the 3rd leading cause of death in hospitals today and drug-drug interactions the 8th leading cause of death. Thus, while medical biotechnology decreased death for children in the 20th Century, it has not contributed to robust health or longevity for the majority of aging people.

The Consumer’s Association of the United States reports that use of over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs does not improve health outcomes. Systematic studies relevant to healthy aging have not been done. Health supplements sold in the natural product industry often have little to no verifiable clinical studies to substantiate their claims. Equally disillusioning is the fact that health supplements are not accurately labeled for their ingredients and often contain other impurities without knowledge of the true active ingredient. Use of health supplements inappropriately labeled can be the cause of unwanted side effects or interactions with other prescription drugs.

Topics To Learn About On Health Care And Aging
There is much to learn on the natural process of aging. Government-entitlement programs, for example, are unprepared. Neither Medicare nor social security systems are financially able to defray medical costs. Social Security has no plans to provide benefits to the 76 million Baby Boomers expecting benefits in the next decade. Medicare is already overwhelmed with claims it is not paying. Baby boomers needs only increase the burden. These are the years for education prior to immediate decision-making moments regarding lifestyle, attitude, spending habits and value changes. Once a health or life-style challenge is upon us, it is often too late to start thinking about healthy aging. Currently, marketing schemes take advantage of lack of education on aging and use marketing-hype to produce fear-reactive buying.

Cell Signaling: More Important Than Breathing
There is a new trend in longevity medicine to prepare us for healthy aging, called cell signaling, The basic concept is that the entire body is naturally wired for cell signaling thus the body can repair, restore and coordinate physiological and psychological activities. This enables seniors to optimally adapt to physical and psychological stressors.

Cell signaling occurs through small proteins in the body called growth factors. Growth factors travel through the lymphatic, blood and electro-magnetic highways of the body and inform cells about environments around them. They transmit information to the genome to change a cell’s behavior to support healthy aging. Growth factor communication balances and integrates the mind with the body for a first line of defense at any stage of life.

Cell signaling with growth factors is more fundamental to the body than is breathing. Cell signaling begins before birth and ends just before death. Loss of cell signaling underlies ineffective adaptation. Inability to adapt is the pathway to death. To stay healthy, as well as repair cell damage during aging, our cells continuously talk to each other to know how to behave in context with the surrounding environment.

Aging has been defined as loss of cell-to-cell communication between the immune, hormonal, nervous and mental systems. Healthy aging is a state of balance, a state of adapting to the flow. Many biotechnology companies have focused on cell signaling as a key for healthy aging. However conventional pharmaceutical companies continue to produce inflated costly products that are toxic.

A New Approach to Cell Signaling
Cell signaling is fundamental to coping with stress, the underlying component of functional aging. A new non-prescription approach to cell signaling without toxicity or prohibitive costs combines the non-toxic principles of homeopathy with 21st century biotechnology knowledge, honoring the basic medical principal, "Do No Harm". Clinical evaluation of homeopathic growth factors in healthy and aging persons demonstrates benefits at mind-body levels.

Homeopathic growth factors are clinically proven to enhance adaptation to stressful physical and mental conditions. Cell-to-cell communication is fundamental to health and unbalanced cell signaling undermines coping with stress, a core ingredient of aging. Cell signaling turns people away from disease processes. The cell signaling approach is helps with quality of life as well as transitions through life’s many stages.

Homeopathic Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1)
Researchers discovered that the central nervous system regulates aging and longevity. Growth factors regulate longevity in the mind, the key regulator of life and death. The nervous system is in constant communication with the immune and hormonal systems using a key cell signaling factor, called insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 is a multipurpose signaling molecule addressing stress, metabolism and coordination of restorative/healing events. IGF-1, for instance, determines which neuronal brain cells live or die when undernourished and when hard choices of survival selection are made. IGF-1 also has the capacity to block HIV infection and possibly other viral infections from proliferating within the body. Thus, IGF-1 protects the mind and the body at the cellular level.

IGF-1 is the workhorse for human growth hormone (hGH) carrying out many functions. All cells in the body have surface receptors looking for IGF-1 signals to instruct it on activities. Only a few cells have surface receptors for hGH. IGF-1 receptors throughout the body help a person deal with internal psychological stress, as well as external environmental stress. IGF-1 is essential for cell-to-cell communication and DNA repair. It is foundational to longevity and has not changed through time as species have evolved. IGF-1 was perfected by nature for specific tasks and is not replaceable by any other signal. In fact, IGF-1 signals are called longevity signals; directly responsible for lifespan.

Clinical Studies Involving Homeopathic IGF-1
Pilot, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies using homeopathic IGF-1 signaling proved quality of life and repair benefits. In four sets of clinical studies on accelerated aging homeopathic growth factors, including IGF-1 significantly improved immunity, nervous system abilities and metabolism in people who had been infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for an average of seven to twenty years. Studies documented through original and replicated studies that cell signaling medicines helped people achieve functional immune, nervous and hormonal systems compared to placebo. Study participants effectively reduced virus in their body, were protected against opportunistic infections, increased immune cell numbers, achieved ideal body weight and increased healthy lean mass. Only homeopathic growth factors improved cell signaling required to defend mind and body stressors that already existed or threatened invasion. Herbs, vitamins, acupuncture, ozone, supplements and other natural therapies were not able to provide these benefits.

Specific clinical studies on homeopathic IGF-1 demonstrated direct benefits to the heart, mind, body and sense of wholeness. A pilot, double-blind, placebo controlled study in Portland, OR found that homeopathic IGF-1 relieves symptoms of depression, enabling the clinical coordinator to recognize who was on treatment vs placebo. Researchers have studied the nervous system and hormonal/muscle tissues to determine which system was more important to longevity. The nervous system and IGF-1 signaling were correlated to longevity while hGH was correlated to metabolism and muscle strength. In terms of healthy aging, ability to deal with stress factors both internally and externally, homeopathic IGF-1 is the multi-purposeful signaling method desired.

Further clinical studies are recommended for systematic understanding of how best to support healthy aging. It is time that all of us look with compassion to our ancestors, recognizing we will probably reach their age. It is our responsibility to lay down a better path of support for the aging population than currently exists.