Reaching old age and staying healthy is not easy.
(Photo: dpa)
When asked about our life expectancy, we have always focused on the achievable age. Age researcher Sebastian Grönke from the Max Planck Institute has shown in laboratory studies that the lifespan of mice can be increased by 30 to 50 percent if life-prolonging measures are used.
Applied to humans, Grönke considers a maximum lifetime of 120 years to be realistic, 130 years are also possible. After their lifetime study, biologists at McGill University in Montreal concluded that there was no evidence for an upper limit on age. And if it does exist, we are still a long way from reaching it.
Scientists in the United States and Europe are working hard to halt biological age and extend the average human lifespan. “Life Extension” is one of the central topics in Silicon Valley today too.
The ambitions of the Musks, Thiels, Sundar Pichais and Bezos are, in addition to traveling into space and self-driving cars, also to find the key to extending life. Methods for this include tissue engineering (tissue cultivation), cryopreservation (freezing of cells) and the donation of young blood.
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Indeed, at the moment, the “Lifespan” is still increasing with advances in medicine. The other side of the coin: the “Healthspan”, ie the proportion of the life span in which people are healthy, is falling significantly. This topic, almost as essential, hardly takes up any public space.
Health is fragile for a fifth of life
There are alarming new data on this: men today spend an average of 20 percent of their lives in fragile health, and the trend is rising. In women it is even 23 percent. What is the use, one might think, of extending life if we are sick for a large part of the time we have gained? Surgeons and the pharmaceutical industry keep us alive for a long time, but the health quality of life, especially in old age, deteriorates increasingly. What’s wrong?
In essence, it is our modern lifestyle that does not keep us aging healthy. A current, large-scale study by the Deutsche Krankenversicherung (DKV) comes to the conclusion for Germany that only every ninth citizen leads a really healthy existence. In short, the study attributes this primarily to too much sitting and too much stress. The assessment of the DKV is shocking when you consider that knowledge about a healthy lifestyle is much more widespread today than it was in the past.
American experts recently defined four fatal risk factors for the inadequate “Healthspan”:
- poor nutrition (“nutritional apocalypse”)
- chronic psychosocial stress, poor sleep (“inflammatory stress”)
- unhealthy stool (“dysbiosis of the microbiome”)
- too much sugar in our food (“glycemic mismatch”).
Their conclusion: Anyone who can get these four fundamental risks under control has a good chance of getting very old in good health.
In studies I am increasingly reading about the danger of “de-aging”, ie the possibility that our life expectancy could also decrease again in mature industrialized countries.
An additional risk factor for the long-term perspective is probably the digitization of our living habits, the constant glance at the smartphone.
Digital abstinence is a foreign word, especially among the younger generation. Issues such as stress and poor sleep occur today in much earlier phases of life than in the past.
What can we do?
Before new approaches from the laboratories in Silicon Valley and other global research institutions are ready for the market and become accessible to us ordinary people, in my opinion the easiest and best method remains to live longer healthily, eat less and do enough exercise.
A balanced diet also makes the cell clocks run slower. It is important to make the changes in mid-life at the latest. Those who only switch to a Mediterranean diet in old age, for example, will probably no longer benefit from it.
More: Individualized medicine: that’s behind the megatrend