Modern medicine has increased life expectancy – over the past 100 years the global life expectancy has more than doubled. But, this has not necessarily been accompanied by an equivalent increase in healthy life expectancy. People are living longer but many of those years are burdened by chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and even cancer. T
This is where it’s important to understand the difference between lifespan and healthspan. Lifespan is the total number of years we live whereas healthspan is how many of those years we remain healthy and free from disease.
Genes are Only 20% of the Picture
Well, it turns out only about 20%t of how long we live is dictated by our genes, whereas the other 80% is dictated by our lifestyles. This means we have incredible power and control over our health in preventing chronic diseases and increasing our longevity.
Americans, on average, can expect to live to about age 76. But their health will start to decline much earlier than that, around age 64.
Lengthening Health Spans
There are currently two main ways experts think we may be able to extend our health spans. The first is by adopting everyday healthy behaviors we already know we should be engaging in: exercising regularly, eating nutritious food, getting good sleep and investing in our social bonds. The second is using more experimental approaches that target cellular processes involved with aging through drugs, genetic manipulations or extreme diets.
These innovative anti-aging interventions have been shown to lengthen the lives of worms and mice. But it would take decades, and billions of dollars, to determine whether they can help humans live longer, too. So instead, researchers are beginning to test a few of them in people to see if they can prolong health spans. The hope is that the drugs and other interventions will slow down how fast someone is aging, which in turn could delay the onset of disease.
Health span and life span are intrinsically linked, so if people live healthier for longer, they are also likely to live longer, period. Studies of centenarians have found that 42% did not experience an age-related chronic disease before the age of 80. In Japan and Singapore, the two countries with the highest life expectancies (on average about 84), people’s health starts to decline around age 73.
It will take years before the research can tell us whether it’s possible to reliably and safely slow down the aging process using experimental approaches. But we can all start adopting some of the lifestyle changes to try to extend our own personal health spans now.
Sources: UVMhealth.org & Associated Press