Not When I am 64....but when i am 164

 Developments in life expectancy and the growing emphasis on biological and ‘healthy’ aging raise a number of important questions for health scientists and economists alike.

Is it preferable to make lives healthier by compressing morbidity, or longer by extending life? 

What are the gains from targeting aging itself compared to efforts to eradicate specific diseases? Here we analyze existing data to evaluate the economic value of increases in life expectancy, improvements in health and treatments that target aging. We show that a compression of morbidity that improves health is more valuable than further increases in life expectancy, and that targeting aging offers potentially larger economic gains than eradicating individual diseases. We show that a slowdown in aging that increases life expectancy by 1 year is worth US$38 trillion, and by 10 years, US$367 trillion. Ultimately, the more progress that is made in improving how we age, the greater the value of further improvements.

Main

Life expectancy (LE) has increased dramatically over the past 150 years1, although not all of the years gained are healthy. Analysis of the Global Burden of Disease dataset2 suggests that the proportion of life in good health has remained broadly constant, implying increasing years in poor health. Furthermore, the disease burden is shifting towards chronic non-communicable diseases, estimated to have caused 72.3% of deaths in the United States in 2016. The result is “a substantial part of life, and certainly most deaths, now occur in a period in the lifespan when the risk for frailty and disability increases exponentially.”3 As a consequence, there is a growing emphasis on ‘healthy aging’ and an emerging body of research focusing on the biology of aging (see refs. 4,5). According to another paper, “this era marks an inflection point, not only in aging research but also for all biological research that affects the human healthspan.”6