- “In the last half-century, major life expectancy gains were driven by finding ways to reduce mortality from fatal diseases. But now disabled life expectancy is rising faster than total life expectancy, leaving the number of years that one can expect to live in good health unchanged, or diminished. If we can age more slowly, we can delay the onset and progression of many disabling disease simultaneously”
- The study also shows significantly lower and declining returns for continuing the current research ‘disease model’, which seeks to treat fatal diseases independently, rather than tackling the shared, underlying cause of frailty and disability – such as the aging process itself.
- Indeed, lowering the incidence of cancer by 25% in the next few decades – in line with the most favourable historical trends – would barely improve population health over not doing anything at all, the analysis showed.
- Further analysis showed the same is true of heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide. The study shows that, with major advances in cancer treatment or heart disease, a 51-year-old can expect to live about one more year. A modest improvement in delaying aging would double this to two additional years — and those years are much more likely to be spent in good health.
The increase in healthy years of life would also have an economic benefit of approximately $7.1 trillion over the next five decades, they added.
“Even a marginal success in slowing aging is going to have a huge impact on health and quality of life,” said corresponding author S. Jay Olshansky of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois-C hicago. “This is a fundamentally new approach to public health that would attack the underlying risk factors for all fatal and disabling diseases.”
“We need to begin the research now,” he said. “We don’t know which mechanisms are going to work to actually delay aging, and there are probably a variety of ways this could be accomplished, but we need to decide now that this is worth pursuing.” - Several previous studies have already shown how we might age more slowly, they team noted. These have included studies of the genetics of “centenarians” and other long-lived people.
Attempts to slow the signs of biological aging have also been achieved in animal models, using pharmaceuticals and also dietary interventions such as caloric restriction or supplementation. But until now, no assessment has been made of the costs and health returns on developing therapies for delayed aging, said the research team.
Source: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/10/1698.abstract
Recent scientific advances suggest that slowing the aging process (senescence) is now a realistic goal. Yet most medical research remains focused on combating individual diseases. Using the Future Elderly Model—a microsimulation of the future health and spending of older Americans—we compared optimistic “disease specific” scenarios with a hypothetical “delayed aging” scenario in terms of the scenarios’ impact on longevity, disability, and major entitlement program costs. Delayed aging could increase life expectancy by an additional 2.2 years, most of which would be spent in good health. The economic value of delayed aging is estimated to be $7.1 trillion over fifty years. In contrast, addressing heart disease and cancer separately would yield diminishing improvements in health and longevity by 2060—mainly due to competing risks. Delayed aging would greatly increase entitlement outlays, especially for Social Security. However, these changes could be offset by increasing the Medicare eligibility age and the normal retirement age for Social Security. Overall, greater investment in research to delay aging appears to be a highly efficient way to forestall disease, extend healthy life, and improve public health.
Article PDF: Is research on delayed aging a better investment than cancer and heart disease_