New research shows that increasing your health span is better than living longer

Despite the ubiquity of reports from various news outlets regarding the oldest person on the earth or the oldest man within the United States, recent research published in indicates that these anecdotes are anomalies.

Life expectancy within the United States, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Sweden has been trending down since 1990, in line with a study that took under consideration life expectancy in countries with the longest-living populations.

Her evaluation shows that more than 15% of ladies and 5% of men are unlikely to live to be 100.

Jay Olshansky, gerontologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics on the University of Illinois at Chicago and lead creator of the studyI said it he and a few of his colleagues predicted in 1990 that the rise in life expectancy will eventually stabilize.

“In 1990, we predicted that the increase in life expectancy would slow and that the effects of medical interventions, which we call Band-Aids, would have less and less impact on life expectancy,” Olshansky said.

Olshansky continued: “A lot of people disagreed with us. They said, “No, no, NO!” Progress in medical and life-extension technologies will speed up, and with it, life expectancy. We have waited 30 years to check our hypothesis. We have shown that the era of rapid increases in human life expectancy is over, just as we predicted.”

But Olshansky desired to ensure that the info would not be misinterpreted.

“Now I want to make sure this is interpreted correctly,” he added. “We continue to increase life expectancy, but at an increasingly slower pace than in previous decades.”

According to Olshansky, the very fact that increasingly people usually are not living to old age is probably not a negative. What this actually means is that people age in a traditional way.

“If you expose enough people in the population to the unchanging force of aging, you will encounter an obstacle that makes it difficult to continue to increase life expectancy, and that is where we are now. You can continue to make progress against serious diseases, but it won’t have the life-prolonging effect that people think – in fact, it will have a debilitating effect.” – said Olszański.

Olshansky continued: “It’s a consequence of success. This is not a consequence of failure. This is a consequence of enabling people to live long enough to experience the biological process of aging, which is now the dominant risk factor.”

Olshansky also cautioned against the notion that extending longevity is a worthy goal; as a substitute, he advocated increased health span as a better measure of quality of life.

“The measure of success shouldn’t be the extension of life. It needs to be an extension of the period of health. This is something we will measure and this is what all of us want. In fact, I’d argue that health is the most respected commodity on Earth, and we’re committed to producing it as much as possible,” Olshansky said.

Olshansky concluded: “Remember, death is a zero-sum game. One thing is falling, another is rising, and there is a fear that we will replace cancer and cardiovascular disease with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other serious health problems that we currently cannot change. So we must be careful what we wish for and what we produce in the future, because extending life without extending health would be harmful.”