What’s more important to you, how many years you have left, or how well you live them? To most of us, both matter about the same.
What good is living longer if we don’t have the strength and ability to keep up with the ones we love, to participate fully in life and to make the human connections we all need?
Today, researchers are working to understand the biology of aging in order to improve and extend the healthspan of seniors rather than merely focusing on lifespan.
Scientists at government agencies such as the NIH, universities like the National University of Singapore and private organizations have shown the potential to slow down, stop, and potentially reverse aging in different organisms, from yeast, worms, to mice.
They are exploring whether changes in diet, taking certain supplements, developing future drugs or manipulating genetic codes can help.
For example, researchers at the private Buck Institute on Aging demonstrated that Calcium AKG, a safe food ingredient, showed improvement in lifespan in invertebrates.
But perhaps of equal importance, in mammalian testing, the lifespan improvements were coupled with improvements in frailty measurements and inflammation, suggesting improvements to lifespan and healthspan are now within reach.
First, the good news: regarding how long we live, on average, we can expect that newborn babies born in the US will live nearly to around 79. That is a considerable improvement since the year 1900, when the life expectancy was only 47.
The percentages of seniors have dramatically increased as well—in 1900, people aged 65 and older composed just over 4 percent of the U.S. population.
Conversely, by 2050, seniors will make up more than 20 percent. Some of the major reasons speculated for this lifespan increase, include the decline in smoking and vast improvement related to how we prevent and treat infectious diseases throughout the world, such as pneumonia, smallpox and tuberculosis.
Now for the bad news: there is a lot of room for improvement. Right now, the United States ranks 34th in the world with a life expectancy in the late 70’s, which is lower than Cuba and Costa Rica (A Blue Zone area), and over four years worse than Japan, according to the World Health Organization. Currently, Japan is the world leader in lifespan.
Some experts believe we are rapidly reaching a point where improvements to the human lifespan may have already peaked.
A study published in the journal Nature concentrated on people living to 110 or older between 1968 and 2006 in the US, UK, France and Japan. The age where people died rose quickly between the 1970 and early 1990 but has since leveled off in the mid-1990s.
The same study highlighted how unusual it was to live beyond 100, regardless of the year in which people were born.
This prompted the researchers to propose that even though we will continue to make progress on eliminating diseases, we will soon get to a point where 125 could likely be the absolute limit of the human lifespan due to genetic factors.
As you might expect, there is disagreement with the conclusions of the Nature study.
For example, in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a team of researchers focused on lifespans of more than 3,800 Italians who reached the age of 105 or older between 2009 and 2015.
According to a press release, a ninety-year-old woman has a 15 percent chance of dying in the next year, and an estimated six years left to live.
At age 95 to 105, the chance of dying the following year eventually increases ultimately to as high as 50 percent. But then, surprisingly, it plateaus past 110. This suggests that with the same odds as flipping a coin each year and only getting tails each time, we should be able to live beyond 115 or 125.
“Our data tell us that there is no fixed limit to the human lifespan yet in sight,” senior author Kenneth Wachter of UC Berkeley mentions in the press release. “Not only do we see mortality rates that stop getting worse with age, we see them getting slightly better over time.”
Regardless of which team is right, the urgency remains. Perhaps emphasizing the point, the USA average life expectancy actually dropped for the third time. Experts are wondering how this could be, suggesting that the opioid crisis and suicides are playing a role.
But in any event, even a temporary plateau in lifespan highlights why we will need to pursue new discoveries and acquire a new mindset on how we approach aging.
There is also a need to focus on the increase of healthspan, largely because of the financial and social costs associated with aging and a shift in how frail we are, in our final years.
According to the World Health Organization, the United States has a healthy life expectancy of 65-69, meaning we are declining in health for the last decade we are alive. This is when we may become frail, subjected to increased hospitalizations, surgeries and chronic illness.
In the USA and other parts of the world, the main causes of death have been shifting from infectious disease to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
Eighty percent of Americans 65 and older have at least one chronic condition — cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, among others — with half of all Americans having two.
That means most older Americans are battling serious illnesses and disabilities throughout their senior years.
These are the same diseases that eventually kill us–the Top 5 causes of death among people 65 and over, according to George Washington University, was heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease in 2010.
According to 2016 US Government data, the potential costs to your income and that of your family associated with growing older are clear:
$7,698 per month for a private room in a nursing home
$3,628 per month for care in an assisted living facility (1 bedroom unit)
$4,800 per month to hire a health aide @ 8 hours/day, or $160/day
Compared to these typical monthly costs (which are also rising with every year), your investment in Rejuvant™ with our VIP Longevity Now program is only $99 per month or 33% off the retail price.
What can be done? An October 2013 Health Affairs study said it’s possible by 2030 to develop lifestyle interventions that moderately increases lifespan at age 51 by 2.2 years.
But the best part was that the study proposed that most of those added years would be healthy. The study also estimated that increasing the number of healthy years of life would save about $7.1 trillion by 2050.
So, living longer remains a goal we all are seeking and scientifically progress is being made. Having a healthier lifespan will give us a better quality of life, place less financial burdens on the ones we love and will ensure we are able to live and enjoy life to its fullest.
Sources:
http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Global_HALE_2016.png
https://longtermcare.acl.gov/costs-how-to-pay/costs-of-care.html
https://publichealthonline.gwu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Cost-of-Aging-IG-1.9.15.jpg
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-claims-human-lifespan-has-limit-180960708/
