#8: 👃🏼 Nose-breathing
#8: 👃🏼 Nose-breathing
It's the optimal way to breathe
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👵🏼 Determining Your Biological Age, And Improving It With Epigenetics
🔑 Improving Cancer Diagnostics With The Blockchain
👃🏼 Nose-breathing: The Optimal Way to Breathe
👵🏼 Determining Your Biological Age, And Improving It With Epigenetics
In Nina’s Notes #3, I linked out to a long-form article diving into the difference of biological age versus chronological age. The key is Epigenetics.
Epi-What?
In Greek “Epi-” means on or above. Epigenetics is what is happening on or above the genome. Epigenetics governs whether specific genes are turned on or off, and this can have broad effects on health, development, and aging.
Epigenetic modifications are the attachment of small chemical groups to the nucleotides of DNA (i.e DNA methylation) or to histones, the proteins DNA is coiled around in the nucleus (i.e histone acetylation), and these tiny modifications impressively regulate whether genes are turned on or turned off.
Epigenetics may be the key to understanding why some older adults seem much younger than their actual age. Several studies show that impairment of epigenetic activity may play a role in aging-related diseases.
How can we find out our biological age?
Dr. Steve Horvath discovered an epigenetic clock that allows us to measure the age of all human tissues by measuring DNA methylation and calculating our biological age.
So far I’ve found one company, TrueDiagnostic, selling a DNA methylation test kit for $499 to see how fast you are aging.
A notable biohacker, Bryan Johnson, documents his healthcare regime to achieve his objective “one year of chronological time passes and his biological age stays the same”, and calls it Blueprint.
Some of his methods require intense discipline and lack of food diversity, however his results are very impressive. He reduces the biological age of several key biomarkers by 12+ years.
👵🏼 Improving cancer diagnostics with the blockchain
In April 2022, 27 researchers wanted to demonstrate that artificial intelligence (AI) can detect cancer cells in biopsy samples.
Typically AI needs a lot of data, and AI model performance improves with the size and diversity of that data. One problem this group faced is that in order to train their AI they would need medical records from thousands of people.
Oh snap! But, that’s medical data. What about data privacy? GDPR?
Medical records contain sensitive information. Because of this, researchers cannot just go ahead and share it with other researchers, and it makes training AI algorithms very challenging. Even though this data has already been collected by hospitals and clinics, it cannot easily be shared.
Step 1, the researchers ran the AI models locally using the data they legally had access to, and then shared the results. (For example, sharing that the result is 4, while not sharing that the data & algorithm is 2+2).
This doesn’t completely solve their problem, because the more data, the better the AI, so they looked for ways to share the data securely.
Sounds like a problem for…the blockchain!
The researchers put the data from the AI models onto the Ethereum blockchain, to achieve 3 things: (1) they secured the data on a decentralized network, (2) used smart contracts to govern access, (3) the results were fast and more precise.
With this approach, they used Swarm Learning (SL) to train their AI-based cancer prediction model on many small datasets, which is the equivalent to training on one large dataset.
The result was a high-performing model to identify BRAF and MSI status, two important clinical and predictive biomarkers, in colorectal cancer solid tumors.
👃🏼 Nose-breathing: The Optimal Way to Breathe
I’m a runner and I remember after a fast sprint, when I was totally winded and gasping for air, my coach would shout “breathe-in and out through your nose! Exhale slowly!” in order to bring my heart rate down faster.
It worked, but I never understood why until reading James Nestor’s book Breath, The New Science of the Lost Art, which dives into the science of breathing and the benefits of breathing through your nose.
Not only can you bring your heart rate down faster by breathing through your nose, but the nose provides a filtration system for the air entering your body.
As air passes through the sinuses, your nasal passages can grab allergens, warm up and humidify the air before it gets to your lungs. This prepares the oxygen in the air to be more easily absorbed by your bloodstream.
Without use your nasal passages weaken, which makes switching to exclusive nose-breathing difficult for chronic mouth-breathers.
James Nestor give plenty of tips to switch you from a mouth-breather to a nose-breather, and Patrick Mckeown levels up nose-breathing in his book The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster and Fitter. In spite of the rather gimmicky title, McKeown validates his techniques with scientific data and provides a step-by-step breathwork training program to get you to optimal breathing.
Want a summary before diving into both books? Sara Rigby from Science Focus does a great summary here.
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