Longer, Healthier Lives

"The COVID-19 pandemic is a highly fatal pandemic largely because of population aging. Our success in delaying death in late life made us vulnerable to COVID-19 mortality."

"[Targeting aging] ought to be the major public health goal of the 21st Century."

"I believe it will happen in my kids' lifetime. They won't age like my mother did."

Colin Farrelly, professor, political studies, geriatric science, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

"It's a very hot area. [And COVID-19 is] focusing attention on it."

"I think of it as 21st Century medicine, as opposed to 20th Century medicine, in which there were these silos of people who treat your heart, people who treat your lungs, people who treat your brain. [Now] they've started talking to each other."

"There's no law of physics or law of the universe that says that aging has to occur. Living organisms are almost definable by their ability to repair themselves ... Aging is the ultimate failure of repair."

"[But] that doesn't mean it's not possible to intervene in the system."

Steven Austad, biologist, University of Alabama, Birmingham

"Nobody has run away from aging by dieting and exercising. You don't see 120 year-old yogis with no wrinkles and perfect, youthful faces ..."

"To change the paradigm, we need to look at pharmaceuticals."

Alex Zhavoronkov, Canadian biotech entrepreneur, founder Insilico and Deep Longevity, Hong-Kong-based

Chinese 104-year-old twins, Cao Daqiao (senior, R) and Cao Xiaoqiao talk at home in Weifang, east China’s Shandong province on November 29, 2009. According to the Shanghai Guinness World Records, this twin sisters, who were born in 1905, were the oldest living twins in the world as of 2009. Photo by STR /AFP via Getty Images

With the onset of old age, people become vulnerable to an entire range of chronic diseases as well as those that ultimately and fairly swiftly and painfully bring on death. COVID-19 with its to-the-moment, as yet short life in haunting the  human animal is a case in point; it is at its most destructively lethal among the elderly population globally. And while a massive global effort is underway to control and if at all possible, eliminate this new novel coronavirus, another solution dangling before scientists is to render the elderly less vulnerable to these killing diseases.

While it is feasible to search for cures to individual diseases wreaking havoc among humans, it appears to make far more sense to their scientific minds to slow down, even reverse the process of aging which would ultimately give the elderly protection against such traditional threats as diabetes and  hypertension, but inclusive of infectious diseases like COVID. In the opinion of some scientists,     COVID represents the newest aging disease alongside cancer, heart ailments and Alzheimer's.

 

And if any among the scientific community is searching out a reason to focus on a new track of medical research with a goal to make living longer more healthy, the threatening presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID is as good as any. Anti-aging scientists now pursue an alternate to the usual lifestyle advice with its aim of living longer more healthfully like nutritional diet focus and daily exercise routines. The focus has turned toward the search for drugs and dietary supplements capable of rendering human biology more amenable to withstanding time's ravages.

 

What they are looking at is the feasibility of reverse-engineering long-lived humans and other animals through more fully comprehending molecular-level longevity biases. Relatively inexpensive and safe drugs are already in use against specific health problems and some of them may hold the answer to the search for a portal to unfold improved health prospects for the elderly years. Rapamycin, used to combat organ rejection following transplants and metformin, a diabetes drug, are two medicines that appear to hold out promise.

There are other drugs in development meant to dispatch damaging "senescent" (zombie) cells that are acquired with age. Science has also examined the gains that might be realized through transfusion of young blood in the hopes of curbing ill effects of the advancing years. Evolution appears to have ensured that humans live healthy lives while in the reproducing stage of life and on into the nurturing stage until offspring mature, after which health prospects begin their slow decline in a timeless repetition of human evolution.

 

In summation an average "biological warranty period" of roughly 70 years is allocated to the process of birthing and raising offspring, after which the body begins its journey toward acquiring disease and becoming frail. Science has responded thus far to that process by managing diseases of old age, enabling people to live longer but not necessarily living well, as the risk of acquiring disabling diseases rises with rising age levels.

 

What researchers see as the goal is chemical interventions through targeted drug use not necessarily to see lifespans extended, but rather to ensure those later years become healthier and more satisfactorily productive to advance quality of life. "That [drug intervention] would change the nature of human existence incredibly. If you had another ten to 20 years of healthy life to look forward to, that might influence almost everything you did -- when you went to school, when you had kids, how many careers you had", noted Professor Austad.

 

Rapamycin was discovered in Easter Island's soil in the 1960s. Ayerst Pharmaceuticals researchers discovered it to have fungal-fighting properties and it was approved eventually as an anti-rejection drug. Its use has revealed that it is "one of the very brilliant molecules that nature made", explained Dr.Zhavoronskov. Feeding mice the drug increased their lifespans dramatically, cutting risk of cancer and an equivalent of Alzheimer's, according to numerous studies.

 

A woman exercises with wooden dumbbells during an event marking Respect for the Aged Day at a temple in the Sugamo district of Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Sept. 19, 2016. The proportion of Japan’s aged has been rising steadily for decades, with U.S. Census Bureau data showing that last year more than one in four Japanese were over 65. Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi /Bloomberg

From there, researchers found the use of the drug in human transplant patients also had the effect of cancer-prevention and gaining resistance to influenza as well as an improved response to flu vaccines in older people. "The overwhelming evidence suggests that rapamycin is a universal anti-aging drug", Dr.Mikhail Blagosklonny of Rosell Park Cancer Institute of Buffalo stated, in a 2019 paper. Administered under a doctor's supervision, tailored to individual recipients, "the time is now". 

A major trial in the U.S. to determine whether metformin (the treatment for type-2 diabetes) is capable of generally diminishing deleterious effects of aging is currently being carried out, the study led by Dr.Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also engaged in studying centenarians for long healthy-life clues. 

The issue of longer-lived populations becoming a burden on health care systems when bad  health throughout the final years of life strikes, is a compelling issue as well in the interests of economics alongside making life during the elderly years less trammeled with illness. The burden of rising health care and social services costs threaten to bankrupt some governments; another reason to study the feasibility of making the end years healthier for any given population.

Christian Mortensen, 114-years-old, smokes a cigar at his home in the Aldersly Retirement Community in San Rafael, CA in 1997. Mortensen was the oldest man alive and celebrated his 115th birthday 16 August, 1997. AFP PHOTO/JOHN G. MABANGLO Photo by JOHN G. MABANGLO /AFP via Getty Images