Your Body’s Hidden Turning Points
What New Science Reveals About How We Age
We’ve always assumed that getting older happens gradually, like sand slowly trickling through an hourglass. But a landmark study published in Nature Aging tells us something surprising: aging occurs in step-wise fashion. It is more like river rafting down the Colorado. You drift along smoothly, riding gentle currents, until suddenly, a waterfall. Then another stretch of calm water, followed by another drop.
The Science
Stanford scientists recently published a landmark study in Nature Aging[1]. They followed over 100 people, ranging from their mid-twenties to mid-seventies, and tracked thousands of biological markers over several years. What they discovered was unexpected.
Your biology doesn’t decline steadily. Instead, it moves in a step-wise pattern, long plateaus of relative stability, punctuated by sudden drops. Two major waterfalls appear consistently: one around your mid-forties, and another near sixty. What happens at these turning points?
What Happens at These Turning Points?
The Mid-Forties Shift
Think you’re too young to worry about aging at 44? Your cells would disagree. This is when significant changes begin:
Your body’s ability to process fats and manage cardiovascular health starts shifting
How you metabolize alcohol changes (yes, that’s why hangovers feel different)
Metabolic flexibility (your ability to switch between fuel sources) often begins declining
For women, perimenopause symptoms may start appearing on average 7-12 years before menopause. Less obvious symptoms include irritability, anxiety, sleep deprivation, hair thinning, tendon/ligament laxity and injuries, brain fog, skin drying and more.
For men, testosterone levels typically begin their descent with symptoms including irritability, depressed mood, loss of drive, central adiposity, less muscle mass, and ‘man boobs’
This isn’t about feeling older. It’s about your internal biology entering a new phase, often silently because we are not trained to recognize it and know how to manage it (see below).
The Sixty-Year Transformation
Around age 60, another biological reorganization occurs:
Immune system resilience and capacity operates differently, often becoming less efficient. Sometimes over-reacting and other times being sluggish or under-responsive.
Carbohydrates and blood sugar metabolism undergo major changes as a result of changes in Insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) and insulin.
Inflammation tends to increase and persist throughout your system, accelerating pain and arthritis, slowing healing and injury repair, and worsening cardiovascular, cognitive, and gut health.
Risks for diabetes, cognitive changes, and physical frailty rise sharply
Women typically have completed menopause resulting in a significant drop in estrogen production with concomitant multi-system changes.
Men also experience a significant decline in testosterone resulting in the potential for a dramatic shifts including a muscle mass loss, propensity for central adiposity, loss of drive and passion, as well as a reduction in erectile function and sex drive
These aren’t gradual changes; they’re biological waterfalls where your body rapidly descends to a new baseline, then stabilizes again.
Why This Matters to You Right Now
Here’s the critical insight: these hormonal and system-based shifts may start years before you notice any symptoms.
By the time you feel something’s off, your biology has already changed. Traditional healthcare usually waits until disease appears. By then you have lost so much elevation it’s hard to get yourself back to your former self.
At BlueWave Medicine, we’re focused on catching these transitions early, while you still feel healthy and vibrant, so we can help you navigate these shifts proactively rather than reactively. This is the reason we require more tubes of blood than any other physician you’ve seen! It’s why we are expanding our athletic performance lab and building out our brain health program. We are obsessed with tracking early in order to slow and often reverse YOUR biological aging. Whether it’s the 100’s of molecules we get from our lab testing (hormones, metabolism, nutrients), specialized multi-omic testing (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), gut microbiome testing, or multi-system functional testing in our athletic performance and brain health labs, the goal remains the same: we want to provide YOU with a roadmap for vitality and health as you age.
Relationships and Aging
The famous 80-year study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, led by principal investigator Robert J. Waldinger, MD has confirmed that the quality of your relationships matters, even more than your income or intelligence when it comes to living longer and healthier.[2, 3] Social connection isn’t just a nice to have, it’s medicine for your brain, heart, and immune system. If you want to invest now in your future best self, put your time and energy into social connections.
The Hallmarks of Aging
Meanwhile, cellular aging research has identified twelve key mechanisms that drive how we age, from how our DNA stays stable to how our cells clean themselves up, manage energy, and communicate with each other. The hallmarks include telomere length, epigenetic alterations, proteostasis changes, autophagy, genomic instability, problems with nutrient sensing, stem-cell exhaustion, mitochondrial function, cellular senescence, intercellular communication, dysbiosis, and chronic inflammation. These are the actual biological processes we can now measure and influence.[4-5] At BlueWave Medicine, we can test for many of these hallmarks including mitochondrial function, chronic inflammation, telomere length, and epigenetic alterations.
What We Can Do About It?
Once we understand your unique biological pattern, we create a personalized plan to address your vulnerabilities and fortify your strengths.
Step 1: Understand Your Current State
Using advanced testing, from detailed metabolic panels to hormone assessments to continuous glucose monitoring, we create a snapshot of how your body is functioning right now. Not compared to averages, but mapped to your specific biology.
Step 2: Targeted Interventions
Based on what we learn, we can:
Optimize hormones that regulate everything from energy to mood to metabolism
Design specific lifestyle protocols—strategic fasting or macronutrient targeting, contrast bathing, sleep hygiene protocols, targeted exercise—that rebuild your metabolic resilience and body composition.
Once you address these foundational principles, we can refine targets using cutting-edge peptides and regenerative therapies to support cellular repair, mental clarity, and immune function
Step 3: Make It Sustainable
The goal is to implement lifestyle and medical interventions that are sustainable in your life. Knowledge is nice but putting it into the daily rhythm of your life is crucial! At BlueWave Medicine, we have created an ecosystem to support you in making these changes sustainable. We are here to help you integrate these insights into your real life through:
Practical behavior change strategies with our health coaches, nutritionists, personal trainers and physical therapists.
Stress management and nervous system regulation with our acupuncturists, meditation instructors, and yoga teachers.
Building the social connections that matter most for longevity with our Evolve webinar series, and regular health retreats.
Your Midlife Opportunity
Instead of seeing your forties, fifties, or sixties as the beginning of decline, I encourage you to see them as opportunities to create the change you want to have in your life. This is the time in your life when you can feel the difference and when these small interventions create outsized benefits.
At BlueWave Medicine, we leverage Precision Medicine to choose the right intervention at the right moment based on your specific circumstances, preferences, and biology in your aging journey.
Upcoming Opportunities
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about:
Hallmarks of aging testing kits for mitochondrial function, chronic inflammation, telomere length, and epigenetic alterations.
Athletic Performance Laboratory (VO₂ testing, movement and strength testing).
For those interested in going deeper in an immersive environment away from the distractions of our busy lives, look for an upcoming email about a Longevity retreat that Dr Brad is co-leading with Sara Szal MD, a 4x New York Times best-selling author and Medical Director of Precision and Longevity Medicine at Jefferson University. The experience will cover:
The real biology of healthspan and how your mitochondria power everything
How to run personalized experiments on yourself (we call it “N-of-1” medicine)
Deep dives into hormones (both sex hormones and stress hormones) and how they shape your vitality
Evidence-based regenerative therapies that support cellular renewal
Behavior change methods that actually stick
The intersection of purpose, relationships, and biology
This goes beyond just physiology. We’ll explore what makes your second act meaningful, connecting the science of living longer with the art of living well.
The Bottom Line
Your body has its own timeline, its own rhythm. Around 44 and 60, you encounter what researchers call “biological turning points”, moments when your physiology can either accelerate aging or unlock renewal.
The question isn’t whether these transitions will happen. They will.
The question is: how will you meet them?
Will you wait until symptoms appear, or will you work with your biology before the next step-wise decline arrives?
At BlueWave, we believe longevity isn’t just about adding years to your life. It’s about adding life to your years; extending the time you feel vibrant, capable, and fully yourself.
Science now exists to make that possible. For this reason, we encourage you to take advantage of the full range of services offered at BlueWave Medicine.
If you’re curious about where you stand biologically and what more we offer at BlueWave, please reach out to us.
REFERENCES
Shen, X., et al. “Nonlinear Dynamics of Multi-Omics Profiles during Human Aging.” Nature Aging 4 (2024): 1619–1634.
Waldinger, Robert. The Secret to a Happy Life: Lessons from Eight Decades of Research. YouTube video, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IStsehNAOL8&t=15s.
Waldinger, Robert. “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness.” TED Talk, 2015.
López-Otín C, et al. “Hallmarks of aging: An expanding universe.” Cell. 2023;186(2):243-278.
López-Otín C, et al. “The hallmarks of aging.” Cell. 2013;153(6):1194-1217.