What is going to be our life expectancy?

Aubrey de Grey, an expert at the FTF, is very optimistic about increasing human life expectancy. For him, the extension of life expectancy is and “can only be” a consequence of the extension of life with health and, therefore, what has to be worked on and what the “gerontological science” focuses on is advances in health.

Aubrey de Grey does not agree on an important point with Jay Olshansky. In his opinion, when talking about a unitary concept called “aging process” there is a risk of looking for “femomatic bullets“; simple strategies that look for a kind of magic method to slow down aging.

What, then, would be the right way to approach the problem? For him, you have to resort to a classic war strategy, divide and conquer. It is, in other words, about prioritizing the preventive strategy. “We must examine, characterize and attack the increase of different types of damage that accumulate in the body, but starting from the basis that what we call damage is a consequence of the accumulation of changes inherent in life; modifications that occur at the cellular and molecular level that the body is willing to tolerate, but only to a certain extent, and that there will come a time when it will not allow them anymore,” he summarizes.

It is therefore not as unitary an approach as it might seem at first, but it is closer to it than the traditional one of attacking one disease every time. “We face a lot of problems, but it is, after all, a manageable number of problems,” he emphasizes. Again we speak of intentions rather than realities, because the expert expresses his “belief” that in the near future these problems can be solved with medicine.

These still theoretical interventions would not only serve to help people who reach 80 or 90 years of age biologically healthy, but also for those who get sick at 60 or 70 years of age.

Living longer thanks to science

Because something that science does seem to have shown is that, although life expectancy changes in different people, the types of damage that accumulate before dying are the same. That is, it gets sick with the same pathologies, although there are those who do it before and those who do it later. “This is good news, because it means that we should be able to develop rejuvenating therapies that work for everyone, even if they have to be applied sooner, later or more or less frequently,” says the expert

It is again stressed that these interventions are, for the moment, pure theory, although it is recognized that it would be important to establish a time frame. But is it possible to do so? Not even the staunchest proponent of its advent believes it and, in fact, speaks of any date being pointed out being merely speculative. However, De Grey believes it is positive that each expert in his area formulates the prediction he can, always pointing out, of course, its speculative character. The reason why you have to venture to set a date, even if it is completely unknown, has to do with society’s perception that, without that time frame, the defeat of aging is science fiction. “If we let society stay with that fatalistic attitude, we are not only promoting a world in which there are more and more diseases such as Alzheimer’s, but we will also live a delay of the moment when these therapies reach clinical practice,” says the co-founder of SENS.

Behind this thought is the important funding required by the medicine of aging and that it must be sought whether the possibility of developing these treatments is 50% in 20 or 30 years – your personal bet – or if it can take a century until it is achieved.

The thesis that aging can be treated as an entity with therapies that are being studied and for which there is still no evidence, generates controversy in the scientific community, as was highlighted in the Future Trends Forum of the Bankinter Innovation Foundation.

Evolution of longevity

Inference taking the hypothesis of this development for granted, there are controversial issues surrounding it. The CEO and co-founder of the company Aging2.0, and expert of the FTF, Stephen Johnston, wonders if this approach – of which its economic cost has been underlined – will be something for few or will be an intervention with a broad impact on society. The question is very timely if one takes into account that the medicine that today applies to the elderly is extremely expensive and is restricted to the ability to pay that each one has, especially in societies where social security systems are not especially protective.

For De Grey, this is not going to happen with preventive medicine of aging, because the main difference with the current one is that, in his opinion, the latter does not work. “It’s a medicine that can slightly postpone death, but death occurs in the end,” he says

However, what would happen if the therapeutic anti-aging intervention worked? Logic dictates that it would allow chronologically ill people born long ago to suddenly be in good health. This would imply a double saving:

1. On the one hand, you would stop spending money on therapies that don’t work, you would save the money you spend on “keeping sick people alive.”

2. For the other, those same people would become or would become productive again.

“This makes it very obvious that these therapies, even if they were very expensive, would pay for themselves quickly,” says De Grey, who defines it as “economically suicidal from a social perspective” not to make them available to anyone who is old enough to need them completely free of charge.

Although there is speculation about the high price of the still non-existent anti-aging therapies, there is already a treatment that will begin to be tested in a clinical trial and has a low cost. This is the metformin, a molecule already used in the treatment of diabetes to be tested as an anti-aging drug. Thus, the study TAME, led by the specialist of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Nir Barzilai in collaboration with the American Federation for Research on Aging ( AFAR), will evaluate this molecule in 3,000 volunteers, who will consume it for six years to see if it also serves to extend life expectancy. “It will start testing next year and the cost is minimal; if it works, it would be cheap and available to everyone,” says Olshanky. This expert, however, believes that the fact that something is expensive should not be an obstacle to its pursuit and recalls that many of the key advances in public health of the last 200 years have not been distributed from the beginning in an equal way, including health, water or education, among others.

In short, although there are scientific disagreements about the possibility of extending life expectancy accompanied by good health, all the actors involved seem to converge on the need to reduce what has been defined as a red zone. “The divergence is more in the specific mechanisms and the scientific approach to achieve it,” says Chris Meyer.

Science is undoubtedly working on it and, among other studies, it is worth mentioning the Long longitudinal survey on Healthy Longevity which, carried out in China, is funded by funds from the US National Institutes of Health and evaluates centenarians who have reached that age in good health,  taking into account their genetics, their behavior and life expectancy that could be expected in them, something that will give a lot of light on this science that is still in its infancy and that will help answer the question that everyone asks:  what will our life expectancy be?