How Every Organ in Your Body Ages From Head to Toe

Our organs were not built to go

into our 70s or 80s.

By the time we're in our 40s to 50s,

we run into problems.

Going from head to toe,

I'd like to talk about how organs and body parts age,

and what we can do about it.

Over the years, our cells, our organs,

suffer from gradual wear and tear.

We age, but we're not defenseless.

Let's start with our brain.

As we age, our brain atrophies.

It's not problematic

unless things pop up that become problematic.

Speech disorders, you've all heard of Alzheimer's.

Many of the causes of these are not particularly clear.

Our brain starts to lose about 5%

of its volume per decade,

probably somewhere in the 30s.

It decreases because of loss of number of cells,

degeneration of the massive tracks and fibers.

Certain things can lead to brain atrophy.

One of them is vascular problems.

As we age, make sure we are on top of

and checking our vascular systems.

Our ears.

You probably think you have two of them.

In actuality, we have six ears, three on one side,

three on the other, outer, middle, and the inner ear.

We age in all of them.

In our outer ear,

our cartilages and our tissues start to droop.

It didn't devolve for hanging Christmas tree ornaments.

By the time you're well into your years,

you'll be able to wipe your chin with it.

The middle ear has tiny little bones.

Whenever you have bones, they come together at joints,

and you know what joints can get,

can you say arthritis?

Presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss,

can be due to arthritis between your little ear bones.

We get to our inner ear.

We have specialized hair cells,

and they send signals to our vestibular cochlear nerve.

That's how we hear, that's how we sense balance.

As we age, hearing loss can be due to death

of the hair cells, what we call sensorineural hearing loss.

We start to lose high frequency sounds

probably around 30 plus.

We do retain most of all low frequency sounds.

[ship horn blasts]

What'd you say? I can't hear you.

Eyes.

As we age, we start to get aspects

of what's called presbyopia,

which is aging of aspects of vision.

The eye is largely a fluid sack.

When fluid vehicles are blocked, this is called glaucoma.

The fluids can become stiffer,

what we call a vitreous humor, can start to harden, shift,

pull away, and you start to see floaters.

Oh, I'm seeing one now. There's another one.

They really bother me. Yeah, I'm seeing...

Look. There's, I got floaters.

They're usually harmless little things.

They don't cause any problems,

but if you see them, you should check them out.

Maybe it's a tear in the retina.

The eye is a direct window onto the brain.

Nose.

These are little bones that come off the nose,

they're called turbinates,

lined with specialized sensory epithelium.

As we age, we're losing many of those cells

in our olfactory nerve.

We lose the smallest cells in the covering of the mucosa.

We do produce less mucus. It's there to catch odorants.

Less mucus, less cells, altered smells.

As our smell decreases,

think of what happens when you have a nose cold

and both your nostrils are blocked.

A potato and an apple will taste the same.

What happens if you can't appreciate the flavor of food?

We try to pull more stuff onto it. More salt.

Oh god, you don't want to put more salt on things.

that's throwing off all your vascular systems.

If you don't eat, you start losing weight.

That's a dangerous thing for many of the elderly.

You stop wanting to go out to dinners,

you don't socialize as much.

Removing that can lead to loneliness

and can lead to depression.

By the way, many medications can change your smell.

If you are noticing

that the pizza doesn't taste like the pizza,

don't be passive.

Skin.

Skin is our biggest organ.

We have proteins in the skin that are called collagen

and elastin, giving structure to aspects in our skin.

Elastin gives us the ability to move.

What happens when we age?

These proteins start to decrease.

Skin all over the body starts to sag,

underneath your arms, breast issues,

your scrotum starts to sag.

What is that? What's happening?

Skin starts to sag on features of our face.

We get a downturn. We get the sad face.

This is giving signals to our other primates that say,

Whoa, distance, unhappy, angry, sad, bad.

They are negative clues.

If I knew stuff when I was 25,

I wouldn't have sat there and baked in the sun for hours.

Now we know moisturize use blockers.

Hair.

Starting in the late 30s, we lose our follicles

and hair starts to become thinner.

This bone, the side of my head is called a temporal bone.

Temporal means time.

When you look on the side of your head,

that's where you can first see hair color starts to change.

The gray comes because we lose melanin.

That's a major signal to some 20 year old that I'm old.

You can knock me over

and you can take my piece of dinner to eat.

Male pattern baldness.

As our androgen starts to go down, we're losing the top,

we're gaining it elsewhere.

On our ears and our beard and our nose hairs,

some of us start looking like Chia Pets.

It's called the Androgen Paradox.

It's a multi-billion dollar business

to figure out how to save the follicle.

It's not the easiest thing to do.

This is really a natural part of life.

You don't have to have the same hair you had

when you were 18.

But be careful

about lots of potentially dangerous chemicals.

Teeth.

So it's in our oral cavity, our tongue,

and also lots of glands.

These glands are producing things that kill bad bacteria.

As we age, submandibular, sublingual glands,

parotid glands start to decrease their secretions.

When bacteria is allowed to spread,

it starts to affect the gums.

They start to recede. We lose the enamel of teeth.

What happens when teeth are removed? The bone disappears.

If you have problems with your upper dentition,

you can get a sinus infection.

Don't disregard your teeth.

Next, the larynx.

The joints of the larynx can age.

The muscles become thinner.

The vocal folds start to shrink,

and the mucus coverings start to desiccate.

We can have arthritis in some of them.

Vocal folds when they're closed together,

they create an ability to stabilize our diaphragm.

When you're constipated,

what you do is close your vocal folds.

They enable you to use the muscles of your abdominal wall

to help nature do its duty.

If these age and the muscles weaken,

we get problems lifting heavy objects,

and we start to have problems with formation and voice.

This is known as presbyphonia.

You can hear somebody

and you can gauge whether they're elderly

just by the sounds coming from their voice.

Heart.

As we get into our 50s and our 60s, the heart muscles,

what we call our myocardium, start to lose oxygen.

It's usually because of problems with the arteries.

We get a hardening of the arteries. They become narrowed.

As they narrow, we have less oxygen going to the heart.

We have a feature in our body

that's called collateral blood flow,

where a structure or an organ gets blood

from various sources.

This is to make sure that the structure

is getting sufficiently nourished.

Our heart does not have a lot of collateral flow.

If we have the death of tissue of the heart,

the overlap of blood supply to the heart

is usually not sufficient to help that heart muscle.

Why not? How come evolution glitched?

Our species, homo sapiens

came about quarter of million years ago.

Life expectancy for our earliest ancestors,

even of our species, 40 plus years would've been maxing out.

Our heart seems to run into problems in the 50s and 60s.

As anybody who's built a house can tell you,

you don't put in extra plumbing if you don't need it.

Uterus.

a female has to carry with her uterus, ovaries,

connecting uterine tubes.

When females age past childbearing years,

hormones are going to change.

Estrogen is going to shift.

The cells are continuing to grow in abnormal ways.

The ovaries become dangerous.

It can't assess ovarian cancers that easily.

Prostate.

The prostate is extremely important early on

in giving help and fluid to sperm.

As you get older now, it blossoms, and as it grows,

the urethra that goes through it becomes blocked.

This starts to happen well into the 30s, into the 40s.

Those of us that are older, we know what it is

to get up three, four times a night to pee.

That's because this prostate is not allowing urine

to have a healthy flow.

This is normal aging.

Prostate exams, I can tell you, are not the most fun to do.

Doc is trying to feel hardness,

which is an indication of cancer.

Joints.

These are beautiful structures.

Here's a patella. Here's a femur.

Here's a tibia. Here's a fibula.

Along these areas are magnificent structures

called articular cartilage.

When we lose it, we can't replace it.

Joint deterioration can begin in your 30 and 40.

If you have abused your joints, stuff will start earlier.

Running is a very, very important part of our evolution.

To get away from some lion that wanted us for Sunday brunch

on the savannas of East Africa.

This didn't evolve for playing football.

It didn't evolve for pounding on concrete.

When we've lost our little discs inside

that are called menisci, we develop all sorts

of inflammation of joints.

That's called arthritis.

Wanna run, find a nice patch of grass.

Try swimming. Get off the concrete.

Don't send me hate letters.

Foot.

Arguably the most important,

least appreciated part of the human body.

When you age, we start to have the issues with vasculature.

The foot and hands are the most distal parts of our body.

Proper circulation is essential.

When I go visit my physician,

he revealed my feet to see if they were warm,

to see if there was good circulation.

Blood flow is a key to so much.

When we start to get reduced blood flow,

we start to get losses of sensation in the skin.

If that occurs, you can fall.

You often hear about people breaking their hip

because they lose sensation often on the bottom of the foot.

By the way, for some of you that have worn high heeled shoes

for years, are you crazy?

Because the end product is gonna be pinched toes,

decreased blood supply, damaged nerves.

Remember your feet.

These are key puppies if we are to remain healthy and alive.

Things change. We have to deal with that.

I still have problems realizing the Dodgers left Brooklyn.

They're not coming back.

I'm old. I'm expensive.

But why do the species keep us around?

It's called wisdom.

And I'll trade in my knee

for the hug of one of my granddaughters any day.

[playful music]