Precision Medicine for Cardiovascular Disease and Related Conditions like Type 2 Diabetes

A Deeper Dive

If you are seriously interested in how you can live a longer, healthier life, then you need to know about this new understanding of chronic diseases. The old models are seriously outdated. There is a new model that explains in detail how fast food and highly processed food makes us so sick that Americans are becoming sicker while other advanced countries are becoming more healthy. Let’s start with the most critical information.

Dr. Milton Packer is a cardiologist who is one of the most famous experts on congestive heart failure in the country. Jardiance is a new drug that was developed for diabetes. Here is a fact about Jardiance that turns the old idea about type 2 diabetes on its head. There are still professional people in this country who believe that treating type 2 diabetes is all about getting the sugar down. They say that losing weight and getting the sugar to normal can reverse diabetes. There is much more to it than that. We have learned that if you get the sugar down using a drug like Jardiance, your risk of being in the hospital for congestive heart failure is reduced by about 30% when compared with achieving the same sugar level with diet, exercise, and other medications. Here is another important fact. Jardiance provides that heart failure benefit whether the patient has type 2 diabetes or not! The Jardiance benefit has very little to do with the blood sugar reduction achieved.

Dr. Packer explained how this works linking genetic regulation and molecular biology in the leading diabetes journal Diabetes Care. This is a simple idea and people without a scientific background can easily understand it. Our genes evolved to help pregnant women and the fetus they carry to survive. There is a master genetic survival switch called AMPK and when there is no food, AMPK is activated and it turns on many genes that help the mother and fetus survive. When we are eating AMPK is switched off. Diet, exercise, and intermittent fasting all activate AMPK.

Here is the punch line. Dr. Packer says this fact changes everything. I am translating his summation into plain English. It is now critical for doctors to change how they understand the benefits of Jardiance. It is an organ-protective agent instead of a medicine that just lowers your sugar level. “The antihyperglycemic (sugar lowering) action of these drugs represents a tiny fraction of their broad portfolio of effects,”…. Jardiance reprograms the genes of stressed cells in patients with type 2 diabetes in a way that promotes the health and survival of all cells and organs. That is a revolutionary new way to understant the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

This is a new kind of precision medicine. Americans are becoming unhealthier while other advanced countries are becoming healthier. Other countries don’t live on fast and highly processed food. Much more of their food is locally sourced whole, real food. Fast food and highly processed food is prepared to make it so appealing that many of us will eat it when we are not hungry and the more we eat, the more we want. Many of us start eating when we get up, and we don’t stop until we go to bed. Eating itself decreases AMPK activity. Obesity is leads to decreased AMPK effects. Caloric restriction and exercise activate AMPK. Jardiance mimics the effects of fasting and exercise. That is why it works on people who are not diabetic and that is why it is a precision medicine. It interferes with the root cause of chronic disease.