An eye-popping study—published in the October 2013 issue of Health Affairs by top scientists at USC, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and other institutions—found that investing in delaying aging would have a much greater impact on life expectancy than investing in diseases of aging directly.1
On the heels of Google’s announcement that the company’s new enterprise, Calico, will research aging, this new study shows that even modestly slowing the aging process would mean an additional 5% of adults 65 and over would be healthy, rather than disabled, every year from 2030 to 2060.1 By contrast, research on fatal diseases would generate almost no increase in the overall number of healthy older adults.
In other words, an investment in delayed aging would increase the number of healthy adults 65 and over by 11.3 millionin 2060. But investing in fatal diseases of aging would not.
In the last half-century, life span increases have been driven by finding ways to reduce mortality from fatal diseases. But now, disabled life expectancy is rising faster than total life expectancy, decreasing the number of years one can expect to live in good health.
The study shows that if we can age more slowly, we can delay the onset and progression of many fatal and disabling diseases simultaneously.
The scientists found significantly lower and declining returns for continuing the current “disease model” of research that seeks to treat fatal diseases independently—rather than tackling the shared, underlying cause of fatal and disabled diseases: aging itself.1
About the same number of older adults would be alive but disabled in 2060 whether we do nothing or continue to combat cancer and heart disease individually.
The team concluded that over the next 15 to 20 years, major breakthroughs in cancer or heart disease would result in a 51-year-old person expecting to live only about one more year. But a slight delaying of the aging process would provide 2.2 additional years, most of which would be spent in good health.3
The increase in healthy years of life from an investment in slowing aging would generate an economic benefit of about $7.1 trillion over the next 50 years— without factoring in the effects of improved cognitive benefits for older adults from delayed aging. There would also be less per-person spending on medical costs. These economic benefits are too great to ignore, suggested the researchers.1
“Shifting the focus of medical investment to delayed aging instead of targeting diseases individually would lead to significant gains in physical health and social engagement,” said the lead study author, Dana Goldman of USC.2
“We need to begin the research now,” said S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois-Chicago, another member of the research team. “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.”
References:
- Goldman DP, Cutler D, Rowe JW, et al. Substantial health and economic returns from delayed aging may warrant a new focus for medical research. Health affairs (Project Hope). 2013;32(10):1698-1705.
- Available at: http://pressroom.usc.edu/new-focus-for-medical-research-efforts-to-delay-aging-are-better-investment-than-advances-in-cancer-heart-disease. Accessed June 5, 2015.
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