The complexity of human health doesn’t change each week. The complexity of our understanding does when another traunch of peer-reviewed medical journal articles arrive. Two million articles are published each year*.
Each week, our world becomes more complex. Some complexity is human made, like our Byzantine-like healthcare reimbursement system, some complexity is discovering our existing realities, such as new information about molecules (DNA, immune proteins) and microbes.
Stanford Medicine-led study clarifies how ‘junk DNA’ influences gene expression – When the first whole genome sequencing was announced in 2000, they found 20,000 genes representing just 1-2% of the 3 billion base pairs. They called the remaining 98-99% of the genome non-coding DNA (a.k.a., junk DNA). This study shows how junk DNA regulates gene expression (“the chef), essentially choosing which gene recipe to make.
Your “immune resilience” greatly impacts your health and lifespan
- Immune resilience is the capacity to control inflammation and rapidly restore immune balance following a disease challenge.
- People with high levels of immune resilience live longer, resist diseases, and are more likely to survive diseases when they do develop.
Over time, our immune resilience decreases as our immune systems are subjected to multiple respond-and-recover cycles.
How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? – The concept of “infectious dose” suggests there are ways to stay safer from harm.
You may need to add “junk DNA”, “immune resilience,” and “infectious dose” to your “staying healthy” strategy. A great opportunity for an AI digital twin to help us make sense of our molecules and microbes in managing the complexity of health.
* Topol, Eric; Deep Medicine, Basic Books, New York, 2019, p138
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