Worldwide Trends in Healthy versus Unhealthy Remaining Life Expectancy at 60

Human life expectancy has been trending upwards, slowly, for a very long time. Life expectancy at birth is influenced by a great many factors that have little to do with aging, and so is much less interesting than, say, life expectancy at 60. At present, that number increases by one year with every passing decade. This has been the case in an environment in which essentially nothing was being done to deliberately target underlying mechanisms of aging. The trend is an incidental side-effect of, most likely, (a) better life-long control over the burden of infectious disease, and (b) general improvements in the ability to treat age-related conditions without addressing their deeper causes, the mechanisms of aging. The outcome of a modest slowing of aging across the life span coupled with better medicines for age-related diseases that fail to target mechanisms of aging is the situation that we find ourselves in, in which all three of (a) time spent in health, (b) time spent in ill health, and (c) overall life span are increasing over time. Near all of the furor over the burden of healthcare spending in overly centralized medical systems derives from the increase in time spent in ill health. It is expensive and difficult to keep someone going when the therapies to hand do not address the actual causes of ill health, meaning the specific forms of cell and tissue damage that cause aging. All of this will change dramatically with the advent of rejuvenation therapies tha...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs