Chapter 1. Generational Degeneration in a Healthy Community

The natural desires of any biological object and species as a whole are survival and reproduction.In nature, through natural selection, the strongest and best survive and reproduce.In artificial conditions, biologists, botanists and zoologists set themselves the task of improving the quality of offspring through selection, and in some cases through genetic engineering, achieving as a result a controlled enhancement of useful traits.For example, increasing frost resistance and fruitfulness in plants, increasing muscle mass in livestock, increasing speed and strength in hound dogs and horses.Thus, in both natural and artificial selection, a gradual improvement of the species occurs, which means that each subsequent generation becomes stronger, stronger and more resilient.

Cultivating the qualities inherent in the strongest and passing them on to offspring is the main task of evolution.The result of evolutionary processes should be the acquisition by the next generation of properties that increase survival and further ability to reproduce.

The implementation of these trends can be traced in professional sports, where records in running speed, long jump, and weight lifting are updated annually.At the same time, professional sport is a complex system of multi-stage training for an athlete.The most promising ones are selected in childhood.Methods of the training process are constantly being improved, methods of drug stimulation and physiotherapeutic methods are being developed to speed up recovery.All of the above has turned professional sports into a serious industry in sports, engineering and medical technologies.

But, unfortunately, the functional state of the same athlete does not remain stable during a sports career and with age, despite maintaining the volume of training, the level of sports results in cyclic and strength sports gradually decreases, and the amount of time required for recovery increases.

Similar trends are even easier to observe in untrained average people.The volume of physical and everyday activities that was easily performed in adolescence, without obvious effort in youth, in adulthood, after forty years, requires significant stress.This trend reflects personal age-related degeneration, which is based on an age-related decrease in hormone levels, a slowdown in the rate of metabolic processes and enzymatic reactions.

At the early stage of decline in functionality, we note only physical discomfort during stress loads.In the case of the development of a deeper deficiency or an increase in the significance of nonspecific stress, which can be emotional, physical stress or an infectious process, will already lead to the development of a serious illness.

Over the past decades, the attention of doctors, scientists, and amateur biohackers has been drawn to the topic of slowing down age-related degenerative changes, the so-called “anti-aging therapy.”It is fundamentally different from the approaches of classical medicine, which tries to prolong a person’s life by curing him of diseases.The goal of anti-aging therapy is to increase the functional status of the body, and therefore prevent the development of diseases.Despite the correctness and logic of the general message and idea, unfortunately, modern research is fragmentary and unsystematic.Most of them are aimed at finding a “magic pill” or a therapeutic method that can solve all the problems described.

The common goals of classical doctors and anti-aging medicine specialists are to prolong life expectancy and improve its quality.Existing reports demonstrate advances in this area.

Thus, life expectancy over the past sixty years has increased by an average of ten years, reaching eighty years in developed countries.

The described facts (the emergence of new records in sports, an increase in life expectancy) can be explained by an improvement in the quality of nutrition, the level of living conditions, an increase in income, an increase in the number of available gyms for physical training, as well as the progress of medical diagnostic methods and early detection of diseases, the invention of new drugs, including for the treatment of previously incurable diseases.But at the same medical conferences where the successes and achievements of modern medicine are announced, there are also reports of an increase in the number, frequency and severity of diseases, which can be interpreted as objective criteria for a decrease in the quality of health in the population.

Indeed, over the past time there has been a dramatic decrease in the age of onset and a general increase in such serious diseases as diabetes mellitus, neurodegenerative diseases (multiple sclerosis), rheumatological diseases (rheumatoid arthritis) and oncological pathologies.

Similar trends are found in different groups of patients with different diseases, which indicates the development of systemic degeneration.A comparison of similar groups of patients from the fifties - seventies of the 20th century and today reveals a multiple increase in morbidity, and a comparison of the level of health recorded during clinical examination reveals a decrease in physical condition in healthy children and adolescents.This forces us to combine the described trends into the term “generational degeneration”, the mechanisms and patterns of which are described in this book.

In contrast to the term “evolution,” generational degeneration is a systemic decrease in the functional state of biological organisms over time, which is consolidated and aggravated in subsequent generations.

A generation should be understood as a set of people born in the same time period, living in similar conditions and reproducing at approximately the same time.On average, generational changes in people occur within 20–25 years.Accordingly, in one family we can usually find three generations: children, parents, and grandparents.Changes in health can also be observed within the same family.This book will describe the changes taking place in humans as a biological organism over the last three generations: from the 1960s to 2030.

My own clinical practice spans 25 years.I work with children and adults, so I know all three generational groups well.This year, the complex diagnosis clinic “PlanetMed”, which I founded, celebrates its twentieth anniversary, and every day my colleagues and I meet with patients of different ages with severe, rarely diagnosed and difficult to treat pathologies - from type 1 diabetes to neurodegenerative diseases, from orphan (that is, very rare) metabolic diseases to oncopathology.Our patients are people of different ages who come to us from all over the world.Long-term observation of patients and their families allows us to analyze how much earlier diseases manifest themselves and how much more severely they are treated.This is one of the sides of generational degeneration.

Generational degeneration is a social, economic, medical and socio-cultural problem, which is now becoming a priority and most important.Each reader can see manifestations of this degeneration in his environment.Today, everyone has a friend whose family has a child with a serious illness, and metabolic syndrome and obesity are registered in two thirds of people over forty years of age.Among your friends there will definitely be a family who used assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, etc.) to give birth to a child.Increased attention to shifting gender priorities has led to the emergence of laws prohibiting the promotion of same-sex relationships, but this trend is not a cultural and social problem, but a medical and biological problem, the mechanisms of which will also be described in this book.Synchronously with this trend, there is a constant increase in the number of people with neuroses, depression and panic attacks, which can be found in almost every young woman/young man.

Unfortunately, it is impossible not to notice these trends, but in most cases they try to find a simplified explanation for this.Thus, they try to explain the decline in physical health in children and the development of metabolic syndrome in adults by a decrease in the amount of physical activity;behavioral disorders in children - gadgets and computer games, and psychopathological conditions in young people - characteristics of teenage culture and fashion trends.

Such silencing and ignoring the seriousness of the phenomenon of generational degeneration provokes a worsening of the described trends, which makes the forecast for the state of the nation’s health in 30–40 years frightening.

Changes in the health of children and adolescents

The assessment of the health of children of the first year is determined by the correspondence of the rates of motor development.A healthy baby should hold his head up at one month, roll over at 4.5–5 months, sit up at 6 months and begin to walk independently by one year.

The standards used by pediatricians and parents themselves are formed on the basis of statistical data, where the conditional norm is the range of values ​​that occurs most often.Thus, modern standards “allow” a child to start walking before the age of one and a half years, or even up to 20 months.But even within these references, more and more children are approaching the boundaries of normality and pathology.The median value - the median - also shifts towards pathology, that is, developmental delay, while conditionally not going beyond the reference limits, and therefore not causing alarm.

Each child individually, remaining within the borderline conditional standards, seems to be healthy, but when assessing the population trend, a negative trend can be traced, which we notice every day at a doctor’s appointment.

Similar patterns can be traced with psychospeech development.Children in general begin to speak later; they are more likely to have hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, which they try to correct using pedagogical and educational influence.However, the emergence of psychologists on the staff of each school and the increase in their demand may also indicate a change in the population psychoneurological health of children.The described changes in specific children are often borderline in nature and do not yet require medical intervention, however, taking into account the parallel increase in severe psychoneurological pathology, these seemingly uncritical changes should cause caution.

A comparative study of hand strength in children using the dynamometry method in 1960, 1980 and 2010 reveals a significant regression in physical abilities.For 8-year-old girls in 1960, muscle strength was 10.4 kg (for boys 12.8), and in the 2000s it was already 5.4 kg (for boys 6.5).That is, the decrease was about 50%.

Adolescents in the 1960s had average hand strength of 31.4 kg (girls) and 45.5 kg (boys), while in the 2000s these values ​​were 21.8 and 31.4 respectively, a decrease of 25–30%.

Obviously, these trends are based on changes in the hormonal and metabolic status of children, which in this case does not depend on the amount of physical activity.

It is worth noting that at the intermediate point of the study - in the 1980s - the described trend was already noticeable, but was not so dramatic.And we can confidently assume that the next cohort study of children and adolescents in the 2030s and 2050s will give even more terrifying results, since the changes described above are a pattern reflecting the generational degeneration of the functional state of healthy children examined during a clinical examination.

Changing adult health

It is known that the metabolic and functional state of the body is largely controlled by hormones.Comparative studies of the hormonal status of healthy men show that in the early 1980s the average testosterone level was 814 ng/dL, and in 2002 it was 536 ng/dL.

A generational decline in the hormonal status of healthy men correlates with a decrease in the efficiency of spermatogenesis;Thus, in 1970, the average was 330 million sperm per ejaculate, and in 2020 – 120 million.

Thus, if the decline continues at the current rate, by 2030–2040 the average concentration will approach 40 million/ml, which is a critical value in terms of the development of male infertility.This is confirmed by the sharp increase in the “male factor” as a cause of infertility in couples.Drawing a parallel between testosterone levels in men and a decrease in physical strength in children who have not reached fertile age, it can be assumed that these children are already at risk.

Similar changes are also found in studies of female hormonal profiles and fertility.When assessing population sexual activity of the same age groups, a pronounced decrease in the number of sexual acts over the past 40 years was noted.The number of couples having regular sex once a week or more fell from 48% to 39%.The overall frequency of sexual intercourse fell by 13.9% during the period described.

Sex, and to a much lesser extent masturbation, is an integral and necessary part of adult life.The statistical “failure” is puzzling and striking because over the past decades there have been a number of changes that, logically, should increase the amount of sex - living conditions have become better, you can rent a room in a hotel for the night or for a couple of hours, various applications and websites have appeared for quickly finding a sexual partner, open relationships and polygamy in general have become more tolerant, the level of sexual literacy has increased.

Both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of sexual relations are falling.Sexual dysfunction manifests itself in different ways; in men it includes decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, disturbances in the structure of sexual intercourse with excessively rapid ejaculation or the inability to complete it.

Female sexual dysfunction is much less noticeable in appearance, although no less significant, and includes decreased libido, pain, and problems with arousal and/or orgasm.Female sexual dysfunction is not so actively discussed in society and in some cases is not at all perceived as a pathology.Despite the freedom of views, female arousal and the pleasure a woman receives as a result of sexual contact is often not perceived as something obligatory and necessary.

However, it is clear that the level and quality of sexual activity is an indicator of the general physical status of both men and women.Reproduction is the most important biological program in any biological organism, through which reproduction is realized.Of course, sexual activity has a number of meanings other than procreation, but one way or another, the lack of libido and the subsequent decrease and absence of sexual activity in most cases is a sign of hormonal dysfunction.

The appearance of a variety of stimulating material: films, magazines, websites, sex toys for every taste and preference does not change modern statistics, since earlier, 10–20 years ago, the greater demand was for satisfaction with preserved desire, and the problem today is the initial decrease in libido, that is, the absence of desire.That is, previously there was a problem with realizing libido, but now it’s a problem to have it in principle.

Borderline conditions

Compensated hormonal dysfunction does not immediately manifest itself in the form of a detailed picture of the disease, but becomes the cause of the development of a number of borderline states of various complexes and systems in the body.The nervous system is the most sensitive to any changes in the body, therefore, with developing hormonal dysfunction, neuropsychiatric phenomena are often the first to appear.Neurotic conditions, panic disorder and affective disorders (anxiety, depression, etc.) are constant companions of a non-resourceful organism.All of them inevitably lead to a disruption of socialization, which is the natural biological program of most species, since the survival of an individual in a community is always easier than surviving alone.For humans, grouping has historically ensured safety, survival, collective food acquisition, and identification of a partner for reproduction.Modern society performs all genetically programmed functions in which a person implements behavioral patterns that are also genetically determined.Violation of biological programs manifests itself in changes in human behavior in society, which has become especially noticeable in recent decades.

If previously the reluctance of a young man or girl to interact with society was perceived as a pathological phenomenon, today entire communities of young people have been formed who have completely abandoned any social contacts.The presence of such features begins to be presented as a special cultural phenomenon (a striking example is hikikomori,

Due to the population frequency, neurotic disorders are perceived and interpreted almost as a variant of the norm, and the proposed solutions often worsen the situation.Psychologization, that is, an indirect and strained psychological justification for an initially somatic disorder, leads to a craze for psychological and near-psychological methods.

Psychotherapy and psychological methods are a tool in the hands of a specialist that should be used only when the person with the problem has the strength and resources for such work.

Due to greater endurance and emotional stability, 30 years ago there was no such huge demand for psychological work, despite the fact that the level of stress did not change significantly.Psychoneurological disorders are not a consequence of increasing stress or fashion; they show a progressive violation of the adaptive capabilities of modern man.

Borderline psychopathological manifestations in children are corrected by educational and pedagogical approaches with an attempt to individualize them; in adults, they try to find the causes with the help of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Thus, analyzing the health status of people who do not go to doctors, it can be noted that the decrease in resources occurs synchronously in different age groups and has corresponding external manifestations - a decrease in physical strength, an increase in emotional and behavioral disorders in children and youth, a decrease in the level of libido and sexual activity in people of reproductive age.Another manifestation of this generational degeneration is the increasing infertility, which is already detected in 15% of young couples, which leads to an ever-increasing demand for assisted reproductive technologies.The etiology of infertility has also changed significantly over recent decades.And if ART was initially created to solve the problem of obstruction of the fallopian tubes, that is, to overcome a purely mechanical obstacle, then modern protocols of reproductive specialists are forced to aggressively interfere with a woman’s hormonal background, and the tubal factor has faded into the background.

Violation of reproductive function from the point of view of evolution is a biological dead end of the human species, and therefore the final point of biological degeneration.

Assisted reproductive technologies can extend a fading family line, but they only model and imitate the natural processes of conception, embryo implantation and pregnancy maintenance.The main goal of this branch of medicine is the fact of the birth of a child, however, despite the optimistic reports of reproductive specialists, the level of health in these children is significantly lower.Of course, in this group there are children who do not differ in all characteristics from their peers conceived naturally, but the level of risk for developing a number of severe neurological and autoimmune diseases in this group is much higher.To preserve the already low resource of such a child from birth, it is necessary to comply with a special protective regime, which includes individual nutrition programs, reduction of immunological stress, including mandatory medical exemption from preventive vaccination, nutritional vitamin support, and in some cases, full-fledged drug correction with hormone replacement therapy.

A decrease in the reproductive potential and quality characteristics of offspring in the mode of generational degeneration can also be traced in groups of children with severe neurological, psychopathological and autoimmune diseases, the number of which has increased significantly over the past decade.The mechanism of development of these diseases will be described in special chapters of the book.

The phenomenon of generational degeneration, that is, the involution of the human biological species, is clearly visible.