The Longevity Div­i­dend is a the­ory that says we hope to inter­vene sci­en­tif­i­cally to slow the aging process, which will also delay the onset of age-related dis­eases. Delay­ing aging just seven years would slash rates of con­di­tions like can­cer, dia­betes, Alzheimer’s dis­ease and heart dis­ease in half. That’s the longevity part.

The div­i­dend comes from the social, eco­nomic, and health bonuses that would then be avail­able to spend on schools, energy, jobs, infra­struc­ture tril­lions of dol­lars that today we spend on health­care ser­vices. In fact, at the rate we’re going, by the year 2020 one out of every $5 spent in this coun­try will be spent on health­care. Obvi­ously, some­thing has to change.

Enter the Longevity Div­i­dend. The Longevity Div­i­dend doesn’t sug­gest that we live longer; instead, it calls for liv­ing bet­ter. The idea is that if we use sci­ence to increase healthspan, not lifes­pan. In other words, tomor­rows 50-year-old would have the health pro­file of a 43-year-old.

It might sound like sci­ence fic­tion, but, in fact, it’s quite pos­si­ble. We’re already doing it in some ani­mal mod­els using genetic and dietary inter­ven­tions, tech­niques related to what sci­en­tists call “the biol­ogy of aging.”

Get­ting there in humans, how­ever, means embrac­ing an entirely new approach to our think­ing about dis­ease and aging, and how we con­duct sci­en­tific research into the two.

Get­ting Sci­en­tists’ Attention

A group of emi­nent researchers first pro­posed the Longevity Div­i­dend in a 2006 arti­cle pub­lished in The Sci­en­tist. The authors, S. Jay Olshan­sky, PhD, pro­fes­sor of epi­demi­ol­ogy and bio­sta­t­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois in Chicago, Daniel P. Perry, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Alliance for Aging Research in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Richard A. Miller, MD, PhD, pro­fes­sor of pathol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan in Ann Arbor, and Robert N. But­ler, MD, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Inter­na­tional Longevity Cen­ter in New York, intended their essay to be a “gen­eral state­ment to sci­en­tists about the need for a par­a­digm shift in the way we think about aging and disease.

The researchers also met with U.S. sen­a­tors who served on the Sen­ate com­mit­tee that over­saw the bud­get for the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH). “We told them we believed Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the third edi­tion of Hour­glass, the monthly vir­tual gath­er­ing of blog­gers to dis­cuss the Biol­ogy of Aging.

For today’s edi­tion, let’s imag­ine all par­tic­i­pants sit­ting around a table lead­ing a lively Ques­tions & Answers ses­sion, dis­cussing as a group, lis­ten­ing, talk­ing. (And, well, aging.)

Q: What is aging?
Ms. Wikipedia: “Age­ing or aging (Amer­i­can Eng­lish) is the accu­mu­la­tion of changes in an organ­ism or object over time. Age­ing in humans refers to a mul­ti­di­men­sional process of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and social change. Some dimen­sions of age­ing grow and expand over time, while oth­ers decline. Reac­tion time, for exam­ple, may slow with age, while knowl­edge of world events and wis­dom may expand.”

Aging may not be the sex­i­est  of words in our vocab­u­lary. Unless, of course (as I heard some­where recently but can’t prop­erly credit), you con­sider the most com­mon alternative.

Q: If the objec­tive of anti-aging research is to extend lifes­pan, isn’t there a risk that we may neglect qual­ity of life. After all, would peo­ple really like to spend more years afflicted by the dis­eases and the decline that often come with age?
Ed (dragged to the dis­cus­sion by Chris and Alvaro): I have rel­a­tively good news to share. A recent Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark found that the pro­por­tion of elderly Danes who man­age to remain inde­pen­dent holds steady at Read the rest of this entry »