Healthy Life Span Increases, and the Age at which We Reach Old Age is Rising

Today I'll point out an interesting paper on the demographics of aging, one that I hope indicates the spread of more nuanced and useful views into forecasts of the future of aging and longevity. While a good read, and helpful for our cause in that it will further spread the message that increases in healthy life span are both realistic and currently taking place, it is nonetheless still the case that this and all of the other long-term projections arising from the demographic community are essentially fantasies. They are simple extrapolations of trends in adult life expectancy established over the past few decades, and are thus based on a model of the future in which methods of rejuvenation are never invented and commercialized. In this future, progress in medicine consists only of incremental improvements to the present marginally effective therapies that attempt to patch over or compensate for the damage of aging. These treatments fail to repair or otherwise address that damage in any meaningful way, which is precisely why they produce only marginal outcomes at best. This proposed continuation of the present gentle upward trend in life expectancy will not come to pass. The trend was established across decades in which no therapy attempted to address the cases of aging, the accumulation of molecular damage to cell and tissue structures that produces age-related disease and degeneration. Consider that for any failing machinery, it is very hard to keep it running when u...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs