Dr Elizabeth Yurth on why we should no longer accept joint aging is inevitable.

The Boulder Longevity Institute aims enable its patients to move from “passenger to pilot” in taking control of their health and give them “tomorrow’s medicine today”. With the rise in people taking a more active interest in their health and healthspan, we were delighted to chat to the Institute’s Founder, Elizabeth Yurth, MD, about her innovative longevity practice.

Longevity.Technology: As a double board-certified physician in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Antiaging/Regenerative Medicine, Dr Elizabeth Yurth has more than 30 years of clinical experience and continues to stay at the forefront of orthopedics, cellular medicine, regenerative medicine and the future of aging. As part of spermidineLIFE‘s Advisory Board, Dr Yurth helps to publicise the benefits of spermidine, especially the role it plays in autophagy and various cellular pathways. It’s time to check out the new joint!

Elizabeth Yurth on…

Fixing more than just the problem at hand

Coming into a health-focused world from orthopaedics is quite unique, since most orthopedics are inclined to just fix the problem at hand. About 17 years ago, I realised I was just simply patching people back together, rather than helping them get completely well and seeing people get progressively worse and worse as they age… I thought “there has to be a better way”, so I started exploring regenerative medicine – how hormones, nutrients, supplements and peptides all influence our ability to heal and get better, rather than just patching people up for a month or so.

Now I work with a lot of athletes, helping them recover from injuries, but much of our world now is trying to prevent progressive demise in people in general – and that includes joint health.

All the joints in all the towns in all the world

Orthopedics is considered differently; people think that my brain shouldn’t go, my heart shouldn’t go… but joints just wear out. But joints should not ‘just wear out’ any more than your brain wears out or your heart wears out. Joints are not designed to wear out – no matter what stress you put on them. It’s an inflammatory disease process and the lesson we are trying to get out there is that understanding joint health, joint pain, the progress of loss of function in joints – it’s is all part of the same cascade of aging that includes the brain, the heart, the liver, the metabolism, &c. Getting that message out there will make a big difference in people’s longevity.

The spermidine intervention

Understand cellular pathways means understanding what’s going on inside your cell and inside the mitochondria is affecting every single thing – heart, brain, liver function. Intervening in certain pathways with a substance called spermidine – which was hard to obtain in the US when I started researching it – can make a real difference.

Our group of cellular medicine physicians realised how critical spermidine is to cell function – it’s a critical entity, not just another supplement. Spermidine is part of a critical pathway, and when you have enough, your cells are going to work better.

Recent research [1] has shown that spermidine can restore T lymphocyte function. As we age, our lymphocyte count gets lower and lower and lower – but it shouldn’t. If we can restore lymphocyte function and keep them healthy we can help cancer, brain diseases, heart diseases – and arthritis since it is an immune-mediated disease.

By killing off the damage [autophagy] and restoring immune health so our cells function properly (are vigilant against cancer cells and other damage and get rid of inflammatory proteins and keep everything nice and calm), then we should be able to prevent arthritis and, at the same time, preventing every other disease in the book. So, that T lymphocyte function is really critical, and so is spermidine – actively – as well.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36387057/