Aging experts are focusing on ‘health span’

Americans, on average, can expect to live to about 76. But their health will start to decline much earlier than that, around 64.

Most experts who study aging are trying to target the second element: not our lifespans, but our “health spans” — the number of years a person lives without serious disease, particularly those related to aging.

Even if a “very vocal fringe” part of the anti-aging community talks about living to 140, said Dr. Eric Verdin, president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, “most serious people in the field do not.” A more realistic goal is “that most people could live to 90, 95 in good health,” he added.

Increasing health span is also more in line with what many people want out of their lives.

“I can tell you that older people are not afraid of dying,” said Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, a geriatrician and the scientific director at the National Institute on Aging. “What they are concerned about is that at some point they will become a burden for their family.”

There are two main ways experts think we may be able to extend our health spans. The first is by adopting everyday healthy behaviors: 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.

The goal is to slow down how fast someone is aging, which in turn could delay the onset of disease.

“By targeting aging pathways, you slow down the aging process,” Verdin said. “Hopefully, maybe people will live longer, but most importantly, they live healthier.”

This is different from the traditional approach in medicine of trying to address each disease on its own, Ferrucci said. Rather than taking a piecemeal strategy, scientists want to stop many age-related diseases in one fell swoop.

It will take years before the research can prove if it’s possible to reliably and safely slow down the aging process using the experimental approaches. But we can start adopting some of the lifestyle changes to try to extend our own personal health spans now, experts say.

Of course, no matter how hard we try, most of us will still fall ill at some point in our lives, whether that’s because of our genes or just bad luck. So perhaps even more vital than the number of years a person lives, in sickness or in health, is their attitude and the way they spend the time they do have.