Afshine Emrani  MD FACC Profile picture
May 26 5 tweets 3 min read Read on X
1/5
I'm a cardiologist. Here's why I recommend men take 5 mg of tadalafil — Cialis — every single day.
Not for ED. Not for performance.
I take it for the same reason every serious longevity physician I respect does: to protect my cardiovascular system, my brain perfusion, and my endothelial health at the most fundamental level.
This drug — famous for all the wrong reasons — has quietly become one of the most powerful tools in preventive cardiology. And the data is now too strong for me to keep quiet about it.
2/5
Here's what tadalafil actually does.
PDE5 is the enzyme that breaks down cGMP — the molecule that tells your smooth muscle to relax and your blood vessels to dilate. By blocking PDE5, tadalafil produces system-wide vasodilation: better blood flow to the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, muscles — every organ downstream of your vascular tree.
Unlike Viagra, which lasts 4-6 hours, tadalafil's effects last up to 36 hours. A low daily dose keeps plasma levels stable around the clock.
Now here's why this matters for your heart.
Endothelial dysfunction — the failure of that thin layer of cells lining 60,000 miles of your blood vessels — is the earliest, most predictive marker of cardiovascular disease. It precedes plaque, heart attacks, and strokes by years. By the time most patients reach my office, the damage is done.
Tadalafil directly improves endothelial function. It reduces arterial stiffness. It shows anti-fibrotic effects on the heart muscle in preclinical models. It's already FDA-approved for pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Most patients come to me when something has already broken. I'm treating the pipes before they clog.
3/5
The population-level data made this decision easy for me.
A longitudinal study analyzing over 500,000 men from the TriNetX database — one of the largest real-world datasets in medicine — found tadalafil was associated with:
34% reduced all-cause mortality. 27% reduced heart attacks. 34% reduced stroke. 21% reduced venous thromboembolism. 32% reduced dementia.
Half a million men. Three-year follow-up. Propensity-matched for demographics and eight pre-existing conditions.
A separate meta-analysis pooling data from over 8 million individuals found PDE5 inhibitor use associated with a 47% reduction in Alzheimer's risk.
A UK study of nearly 270,000 men found that those with 20 or more tadalafil prescriptions had a 44% reduction in dementia risk.
I want to be transparent: these are observational studies, not randomized controlled trials. But the consistency of the signal across multiple large databases, the biological plausibility, and the established safety profile make this a compelling addition to a longevity protocol.
4/5
Your brain is 2% of your body weight but demands 20% of your cardiac output. Any compound that meaningfully enhances cerebral blood flow is, by definition, a cognitive protector.
Tadalafil is being actively investigated in clinical trials for vascular dementia and cognitive decline caused by poor cerebral perfusion. The mechanism is the same — better vasodilation, better oxygen delivery, better nutrient transport to the organ that matters most.
For athletes — better blood flow means better oxygen delivery to working muscle, faster recovery, reduced exercise-induced inflammation, and measurable improvements in endurance. Studies at high altitude show real advantages. This isn't a stimulant. It's superior vascular infrastructure.
Short-term you notice: lower resting blood pressure, sharper mental clarity, better performance in the gym, and yes — stronger erections.
Long-term you're building: the cardiovascular system you were supposed to have.
5/5
My protocol:
2.5-5 mg daily, same time each day. Food doesn't affect absorption. Avoid grapefruit — it can spike levels unpredictably.
Critical safety — do NOT combine with nitrates. Nitroglycerin, isosorbide, poppers. The combination causes a dangerous blood pressure drop. Use caution with very low baseline blood pressure or certain CYP3A4 inhibitors. Always discuss with your own physician.
This drug has 20+ years of clinical safety data across millions of prescriptions. It's well-established. It's generic. It costs pennies a day.
I call it Vitamin C-ialis.
Because in 20 years, when my vascular age is still tracking 15 years younger than my chronological age, I'll know exactly why.
This isn't about the bedroom. It's about keeping the most important infrastructure in your body functioning at peak performance for as long as humanly possible.
And yes — the bedroom advantage is a nice bonus.
Not medical advice. Talk to your physician. But if you're serious about longevity and cardiovascular optimization, this is one of the highest-ROI interventions I've found in twenty years of practice.

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More from @afshineemrani

May 29
1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I'm also an Iranian Jew.
I don't talk about this often on here. But today I want to tell you something about who I am — and why I see the world the way I do.
My family's roots in Persia stretch back roughly 2,700 years. We were among the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. Synagogues in Isfahan. Scholars in Shiraz. Merchants and physicians in Tehran. We survived every empire that rose and fell across that ancient land.
And then, in a single generation, most of it vanished.
After 1979, the Jewish community of Iran — once 100,000 strong — collapsed. My family was among those who left. We carried our faith, our language, our poetry, our medical traditions, and the memory of a home that no longer wanted us.
We came to America.
2/5
I love this country with a depth I think only immigrants fully understand.
Not the abstract love of someone born into abundance. The fierce, protective, almost desperate love of someone who has seen what happens when the foundations that guarantee liberty shift beneath your feet.
America gave my family something Persia could not: the freedom to build without fear. The freedom to practice medicine. To pray openly. To raise children in safety. To write, to speak, to dream — without looking over our shoulders.
Every opportunity I've had — UCLA, my cardiology practice, my books, this platform — exists because America kept its promise to a family that arrived with almost nothing.
That kind of debt doesn't expire. And that kind of gratitude doesn't stay quiet when you feel the foundations being tested.
3/5
When you come from a heritage that has experienced civilizational loss, you see cultural shifts differently than people who haven't.
I've watched it happen across the Middle East.
The ancient Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa — once the thriving heart of the Christian world — have dwindled to tiny fractions of what they were. Communities that endured for centuries, with ancient churches, scholars, and traditions stretching back to the earliest days of Christianity.
The Copts. The Assyrians. The Chaldeans. The Maronites. The Yazidis.
The physical geography remains. But the cultural fabric has been fundamentally altered. These communities didn't disappear overnight. The change was gradual — decade by decade, generation by generation — until one day the landscape was unrecognizable.
My own community is proof. 2,700 years in Persia. Gone in a generation.
Read 6 tweets
May 28
1/5 I'm a cardiologist. After twenty years of treating hearts, I've arrived at a truth that changed how I practice medicine.
The health of your brain is inseparable from the health of your heart. They rise or fall together.
And cognitive decline doesn't begin the day you forget a name or misplace your keys.
It begins years earlier — the moment movement quietly disappears from your daily life.
This isn't a metaphor. It's a biological mechanism. And once you understand it, you'll never think about sitting the same way again.
2/5
Your brain is the most adaptive organ in your body. It constantly scans for demand.
When you sit for hours — at a desk, in a car, on a couch — your nervous system receives a very clear message: demand is low. The body isn't moving. The brain reasons it doesn't need to maintain full processing power.
So it begins to dial things down.
Neuroplasticity decreases. BDNF — the brain's natural growth fertilizer — drops. Neural connections get pruned. The hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and other regions governing memory, focus, and decision-making slowly shrink.
Here's the insight that changes everything: your brain isn't breaking down from damage.
It's adapting. Rationally. To reduced demand.
The same way a muscle atrophies when it isn't loaded, your brain withdraws investment when it isn't challenged by physical movement. And the adaptation happens terrifyingly fast — a few weeks of prolonged sitting can shift the trajectory.
3/5
I see this pattern in my cardiology practice every day.
Patients who develop atrial fibrillation, coronary disease, or heart failure almost always show cognitive changes at the same time. Not because "old age" suddenly arrived — but because years of sedentary living sent the identical signal to both their heart and their brain: we are not being used.
The heart weakens. The brain retreats. Same cause. Same timeline. Same patient.
Prolonged sedentary time is independently linked to worse outcomes even in people who exercise regularly. That's the part most miss — a morning workout doesn't fully undo eight hours of sitting. The nervous system adapts to the dominant signal of the day. And for most people, the dominant signal is stillness.
This is most dramatic in Parkinson's disease. Patients who stay physically active — walking, lifting, dancing, moving with intention — hold onto their cognitive abilities far longer, even as motor symptoms progress.
It's not simply better blood flow or more BDNF. It's the fundamental way the nervous system responds to perceived demand.
Keep moving, and the brain keeps investing. Stop moving, and it begins to withdraw resources.
Read 6 tweets
May 26
1/5
.@elonmusk just told Forbes: "The future of medicine will be digital. If you know what to program into that synthetic RNA strand, you can basically cure anything."
The internet is divided. Half think it's visionary. Half think it's hype.
I'm a cardiologist. I already prescribe RNA-based medicine to my patients. In my office. Today.
Let me show you exactly where we are — what's already real, what's coming, and what's still theoretical. No hype. No fear. Just the clinical truth.
2/5
What's already here — right now, in my practice:
Inclisiran. Brand name Leqvio. An siRNA injection I administer to patients twice a year. It silences the PCSK9 gene in the liver — the gene responsible for producing a protein that raises LDL cholesterol.
Two shots a year. LDL drops roughly 50%. No daily pills. No monthly injections. The drug enters your liver cells, finds the specific mRNA that codes for PCSK9, and destroys it. Your liver simply stops making the protein that was raising your cholesterol.
FDA-approved. Now cleared as first-line monotherapy as of last year. Sustained LDL reduction documented out to nearly 7 years. Over 60,000 patients across 30+ clinical trials.
That's not digital medicine as a metaphor. That's literally a synthetic RNA strand programmed to silence one gene. Musk's language is engineering shorthand for what I already do in clinic.
3/5
What's arriving now — the next 12-24 months:
VERVE-102. Data presented just days ago. A base editor that permanently turns off the same PCSK9 gene with a single infusion. 88% reduction in PCSK9 protein. 62% reduction in LDL cholesterol. Sustained 18 months. No serious adverse events. Phase 2 beginning this year.
One dose. Cholesterol stays low — potentially for life. It mimics the genetic protection that rare individuals are born with — people who carry natural PCSK9 loss-of-function variants and almost never develop heart disease.
We are engineering natural genetic luck into anyone who needs it.
Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. Moderna and Merck sequence your individual tumor, identify up to 34 unique mutations, and engineer a custom mRNA strand that teaches your immune system to hunt your specific cancer cells. 49% reduction in recurrence or death at five years in melanoma. Phase 3 trials expanding into lung, kidney, and bladder cancer.
In pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest — patients who mounted an immune response to a personalized mRNA vaccine achieved 100% recurrence-free survival at 18 months.
A vaccine. Custom-built for your tumor. From an RNA strand.
Read 6 tweets
May 26
1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I have spent twenty years watching cholesterol destroy arteries, trigger heart attacks, and kill people I care about.
Today, Eli Lilly presented data that may begin to end that era.
VERVE-102. A single infusion. One dose. It uses base editing to permanently turn off the PCSK9 gene in your liver.
Presented today at the European Atherosclerosis Society Congress:
88% reduction in PCSK9.
62% reduction in LDL cholesterol.
Sustained up to 18 months.
No treatment-related serious adverse events.
One infusion. Not daily pills you forget to take. Not monthly injections. One dose — and your cholesterol may stay low for the rest of your life.
2/5
Let me explain why this is so profound.
There are rare people born with naturally occurring loss-of-function variants in the PCSK9 gene. Their bodies produce very little PCSK9 protein. Their LDL cholesterol stays naturally low throughout their entire lives. They almost never develop coronary heart disease.
VERVE-102 is designed to give that same genetic protection to anyone who needs it. One infusion. Permanently edits the gene. Mimics what nature already does in the luckiest among us.
Lilly acquired the technology for roughly $1 billion and is preparing to launch Phase 2 trials by the end of this year.
Heart disease remains the number one killer on earth. Every moment of LDL exposure matters for your lifetime cardiovascular risk. A one-time treatment that durably eliminates excess LDL could prevent millions of heart attacks that haven't happened yet.
This is not incremental. This is a paradigm shift.
3/5
But cholesterol is only the beginning. Look at what's converging right now across medicine.
Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. Moderna and Merck's personalized neoantigen vaccine showed a 49% reduction in cancer recurrence or death at five years in melanoma patients. They sequence your individual tumor, identify up to 34 unique mutations, and engineer a vaccine that teaches your immune system to hunt your specific cancer cells. Phase 3 trials are fully enrolled. They're expanding into lung cancer, kidney cancer, and bladder cancer.
In pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest — patients who mounted an immune response to a personalized mRNA vaccine achieved 100% recurrence-free survival at 18 months.
A vaccine. For cancer. Personalized to your tumor. We said this was impossible ten years ago.
Read 5 tweets
May 20
1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I need to tell you something that will change how you think about heart disease screening.
The standard approach — EKGs, echocardiograms, stress tests, basic labs, a cholesterol panel — misses approximately 75% of people who will go on to have a heart attack, stroke, or cardiac death.
These tests check how your heart functions. They do not check what's quietly building inside your arteries.
And the arteries are where plaque accumulates silently for decades before you feel the first chest pain. By then, the event is already happening.
Most heart attacks aren't caused by severely blocked arteries. They're caused by soft, inflamed, rupture-prone plaque that no stress test on earth will detect.
There is a better way. I use it in my practice. Here are the tests that actually find the disease before it finds you.
2/5
Coronary CT Angiogram with AI plaque composition analysis.
This is the single most important upgrade in cardiac prevention in the last decade.
It visualizes your coronary arteries in 3D, quantifies your total plaque burden, and — critically — uses AI to tell me exactly how much plaque is soft, lipid-rich, and rupture-prone versus stable and calcified.
Why this matters: non-obstructive plaque causes most cardiac events. Your arteries can look "clear enough" on a stress test while harboring the exact kind of soft plaque that ruptures without warning. This test finds it.
Medicare just started reimbursing AI-enhanced plaque analysis. If you're over 40 with any risk factors, ask for this by name: coronary CT angiogram with plaque composition analysis.
If soft plaque is found early, we can stabilize and often reverse it with aggressive statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, GLP-1s, and lifestyle intervention. I've seen it happen in my practice.
3/5
Coronary Artery Calcium score.
A quick, low-radiation CT scan that measures calcified plaque in your heart arteries. Takes minutes. Costs roughly $100 out of pocket in most markets.
Here's why cardiologists call this the most prognostic test in preventive cardiology:
A zero score means extremely low 10-year risk — even if your LDL cholesterol looks concerning. It's been called "the power of zero." A high score means it's time to escalate prevention immediately — regardless of how you feel.
This single test reclassifies risk better than any traditional calculator. I've had patients whose standard risk score said "low" but whose calcium score revealed significant disease. Without this test, they'd have walked out of my office reassured and wrong.
Advanced lipids — ApoB and Lp(a).
Standard LDL cholesterol measures cholesterol content inside the particles. ApoB counts every single atherogenic particle hitting your artery walls. A 2024 analysis found 54% of patients had dangerous ApoB levels that standard LDL completely missed.
Lp(a) is 100% genetic. Test it once in your lifetime. 1 in 5 Americans are elevated. It triples heart attack risk independently. The 2026 ACC/AHA guidelines now recommend universal screening.
Read 6 tweets
May 20
1/5
I need to talk to you about what GLP-1 drugs are doing to the brain.
For decades, medicine has treated metabolic health, cardiovascular health, and mental health as completely separate systems. Separate doctors. Separate drugs. Separate departments.
Biology may not work that way.
A landmark study just published in The Lancet Psychiatry is forcing us to reconsider everything.
2/5
Taipale et al. tracked 95,490 people across 13 years of Swedish national data — people with pre-existing depression and anxiety, compared against themselves on and off semaglutide.
44% less worsening depression. 38% less worsening anxiety. 47% less worsening substance use disorder. 44% less self-harm.
Nearly half. Across every psychiatric measure they tracked.
"Ozempic personality" dominated headlines recently — the fear that GLP-1 drugs flatten your ability to feel pleasure.
But if semaglutide stole pleasure at scale, depression would climb.
It fell by nearly half.
3/5
The mechanism tells a different story than the fear.
These drugs appear to quiet compulsive craving without suppressing genuine satisfaction. Less "I need this." Same capacity for joy.
Some of it is likely indirect — better metabolic health, weight loss, lower systemic inflammation, improved sleep, improved mobility, and the psychological impact of finally feeling healthier in your own body.
But there is growing evidence that GLP-1 receptors in the brain's reward and impulse pathways are doing something more direct. Something we don't yet fully understand.
A separate BMJ study following 606,000 veterans found GLP-1 users had 18% less alcohol use disorder, 20% less nicotine dependence, and 25% less opioid use disorder — even in people with no prior substance use history.
These are staggering numbers for a drug class designed to treat diabetes.
Read 5 tweets

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