[Eilene]

I will reach out, thank you. This is very helpful. Your last paragraph describes Peter accurately. At some point, all the years of chronic stress, too little sleep, too many stimulants (even before IV drug abuse) changed him somehow. I'm not a doctor, but I knew him for almost 30 years and over the course of a decade or so something profound changed.

[robg]

That's the truly crazy thing to me - over a decade if someone was gaining a lot of weight or had a heart attack or drinking more and more maybe the people who care would try to stage an intervention. But if it's lack of sleep and/or too much stress, it's shrugged off as they are so hard working and productive and dedicated. It's a culture of Type A people and the rewards that go with that professionally. And now we're raising generations to act the same way. I'm of the belief that the obesity epidemic is a symptom not a cause. Food is naturally rewarding and de-stressing.

Back to telomerase (Blackburn won the Nobel) and the glymphatic system (Nedergaard will win the Nobel). In short, chronic stress causes significant damage across the body and down to the cellular level. Sleep is the body's way to recover and the glymphatic system appears to be the cleaning process in the brain, down to the cellular level. When you have much more damage and insufficient recovery, something really has changed, like a car driven too fast, too hard, without oil changes for a decade.