Chicago’s Morning Answer host Chris Krok, filling in for Dan Proft, reflected on his years covering veterans issues in Dallas-Fort Worth, including his relationship with the late Chris Kyle and Kyle’s charitable foundation. Krok recalled becoming close with the young man who ran that organization after Kyle’s death, describing the physical and psychological toll of combat the man carried home, including hearing loss and post-traumatic stress after losing several members of his unit overseas. Krok said the conversation was a reminder that many of the wounds service members bring home are not visible.
Krok welcomed Jimmy St. Louis, CEO of Agentis Longevity, a former NFL tight end for the Tennessee Titans, and a competitive rower for Team USA, ahead of an upcoming Congressional Veterans Care Forum in Washington, D.C. St. Louis said the forum, to be held in the Cannon House Office Building with roughly seventy-five attendees, is intended not only to raise awareness but to produce concrete action items aimed at improving veteran care.
Much of the conversation focused on the relationship between combat stress and hormone health, a subject St. Louis said is not widely understood. He explained that testosterone and estradiol levels can be significantly disrupted by the extreme stress of deployment, and that veterans often return home to an entirely different environment without those hormonal systems having recovered. St. Louis said this depletion is closely linked to mental health outcomes, including the elevated rate of suicide among service members and veterans, which he cited at an average of twenty-two deaths per day. He noted that research has found a strong correlation between severely depleted testosterone levels and veterans who died by suicide, with a large share found to be in a chronically deficient hormonal state at the time.
St. Louis also discussed peptide therapy, describing peptides as short chains of amino acids used in treatments related to recovery, muscle building, bone density, and cognitive function. He said regulatory questions around compounding and the broader use of peptide therapies will be a major focus of a separate congressional hearing later in the month, and that current VA protocols do not yet incorporate many of these newer treatment approaches, something his organization is working to change through direct engagement with the agency. He connected the same hormonal imbalances to early indicators of PTSD and traumatic brain injury, arguing that anxiety and depression symptoms tied to hormone disruption often compound the effects of those diagnoses.
St. Louis credited the Core Medical Foundation, founded by Sydney Gordon, with providing access to hormone optimization and peptide therapy for veterans who might not otherwise be able to afford such care. Reflecting on his own path, St. Louis said his shift from professional football to competitive rowing roughly a decade later, and eventually into health care entrepreneurship, grew out of a family background in medicine and a personal interest in recovery-focused athletic training. He said the discipline of rest, recovery, and repeated performance he learned through rowing directly informed his approach to longevity medicine and ultimately led him to found Agentis Longevity.