Spend any time with elderly people and you will at once notice a certain peacefulness in many of them. This is especially true of those in nursing homes and retirement complexes. A certain amount of this calm is due to age and acceptance. Accepting the inevitability of their place in life and the understanding, they have nearly completed their allotted time on earth. Still some are determined to live their remaining years with a stubborn determination that surprises some gerontologists.
There are likely a number of reasons one could speculate on why this difference exists in certain people at this stage of their lives. Those elders with a zest for life and something to live for are determined to squeeze every last drop out of their remaining time and still some appear determined to prove the phrase “God’s Waiting Room” accurate as nursing homes have been called.
If you were to discuss the subject of aging and anti aging treatments and therapies, with this combined group of elders, your conversation would quickly turn to their health and how their physicians treat them. Those in reasonable health would tend to praise their health care and may even talk of certain anti aging treatments they are using while others who are suffering age related illnesses such as heart problems, diabetes and early dementia would probably be less than enthusiastic about their treatments and long term viability.
When I last visited a nursing home, I was immediately struck by the difference in the patrons – their mobility and socializing specifically. Cliques seemed to form between those who moved about without assistance and those who did not. Activities had more participants who were mobile and sociable than those who had less of each. Dinner time was interesting as those with less social bearing tended to meet and socialize at the dinner table and would sit long past dinner and meet with others in the same condition. Their world’s had shrunk to this simple activity of eating at a table and chatting, then back to their lone existence, the spry set would meet for cards or take a walk, etc.
It was obvious that mobility and reasonable health played a huge role in adaptability and socialization in these institutions. Lack of mobility means they cannot leave the premises without a home sponsored tour with assistants or taking a cab and half their belonging with them for a visit. Everything becomes an effort for those who lack physical well being. The elder healthier set will not sit about complaining they never see family, they will jump in their car [if they still have one and can drive] and come to see you, or take a bus or cab to get there. They do this more for themselves, to get away from the home for some time away, than anything else.
These healthier occupants in the elder facilities are also very aware of medical information, health breakthroughs and computer literate so they can do their own research. They are in charge of their bodies. Tell these folks that anti aging therapies are working toward maintaining reasonably good health for people well into their eighties, followed by a rapid decline of just a few months and look out! The theory is to alleviate the more common suffering with age related illness as people reach a standardized life span. It is what some believe anti aging medicine should be focused on – the longevity of the health span and not the life span. The focus being on what is known as “rectangularization of morbidity.”
In simple language this means with an aging population, health care costs skyrocket as age related illness begins to take a toll on an aging population. One study shows eight of ten people will suffer from some age related illness after age sixty five. Life spans have increased dramatically, more than ever people are living past sixty five years of age. The total rose from twenty five percent in 1900 to seventy percent in the mid eighties when the “morbidity report” was tabled. Boomers will make up a huge proportion of those over age sixty five by the year 2020, the cost of caring for this population will explode from a personal care and a social assistance perspective.
The healthy and mobile elderly do not want to hear this. They cannot imagine not having the opportunity to live as long as possible and expect healthcare and assisted living to be available to them if it is required at any age – period! Many elderly folks read the same stories everyone else does about longevity research and mice living longer with resveratrol, wine drinking and anti aging etc. They have goals to outlive their own ancestors regardless of any poor genetics that may be involved.
Many elderly people now have “longevity physicians” rather than family physicians or gerontologists. These doctors will treat them with hormone replacement therapy and anti aging supplements to bring them to peak fitness for their age. Many feel better than they have in years. These are the ones that had a good enough health baseline to work with from the get go. Even though there is no direct evidence to support the effectiveness of many of these health treatments from an anti aging perspective. However, who are we to criticize their attempts to live for as long as possible.
Sure there are bogus therapies for anti aging people should be aware of but what we cannot and should not take from people of any age is hope. If someone believes he or she feels better because of a certain treatment or supplement they are using, then we should be supportive of that and not critical. The Gerontological Society of America puts on symposiums to lift the veil from the anti aging industry, at least that part which they believe is spurious. Often genuine anti aging or longevity researcher get caught in this crossfire due to their established fields and methods that are not in line with institutional parameters.
Many younger scientists in the field of longevity or anti aging find they are being somewhat censored. Their seems to be a generational disrespect for new science and old beliefs. It is difficult if not impossible to speak about aging as a disease since that can be construed as ageist. You cannot speak about how much better it is to youthful than old – young is better than elderly for fear of perhaps stigmatizing or persecuting the elderly. There is certainly an air of destabilizing political correctness when it comes to professionally researching and presenting anti aging findings.
Anti aging and longevity as an industry, a science or medicine is all over the place, no universal consensus linking any of the three and there are private, public and corporate interests all acting on their own and pressing forward to spread the word about healthy life extension to an eager consumer. There will be a lot of money spent in the next twenty to thirty years on anti aging treatments and therapies so the idea of longer life spans is not going away anytime soon. Anyone over the age of fifty is keenly aware of this. Just reflect on the following, for instance:
• A Stanford University Prof who is an expert in population mathematics and statistics states that progress made in anti aging in the industrialized nations might increase life spans by one year for each year of the time span from 2010 to 2030.
• According to the National Institute on Aging, the gold standard of gerontology funded by government, is currently funding a study that will evaluate a prolonged, broad spectrum program of life extension substances on lab mice at three top notch research facilities. The studies original intent was to expose commercial claims about the compounds, preliminary outcomes have identified three compounds that actually increase the life spans of mice – a tremendous shock to those skeptics in charge of the studies.
• One more NIA trial, this one conducted on humans, displayed how a thickening of the carotid artery, a main factor in aging and a risk indicator for stroke, was reduced considerably by those taking part in caloric restriction trials.
• The renowned RAND Corporation quizzed the country’s top gerontologists, cardiologists and geriatricians regarding the potentiality of a main life extension compound, surprisingly the reaction was quite positive, many of those asked said within ten years there was a fifty percent chance of having such a serum.
• Peter Thiel, one of the originators of PayPal and an icon in the world of investment has recently funded a project with $3.5 million with the intent to put an “end to aging” and nothing less.
• The Large Pharma giant Glaxo only just spent $750 million for the rights to produce resveratrol, a popular element amongst anti agers that has shown anti aging properties in lab animals and other healthful benefits related to age linked diseases.
• Rice University, the environmental engineering department to be specific, is one of the best in the world in their field and they Are heading up an investigation into using a soil bacteria as a means to seek and destroy human arterial plaque. Experts agree it would essentially put an end to arterial senescence as we have come to understand it.
• The National Institute of Health is financing studies of swine to primate organ transplants in the hope that it will move this science technology forward as we see a trend toward lesser organ supply to meet the demand that will be much worse than it already is currently.
• A fast growing group of aging adults is not about to wait for the major drug companies to come to their aid. There is a rocketing quantity of prescriptions being filled of late for hormone-based anti aging products and interestingly the majority of these scripts are being paid for in cash.
With so many people, heading for the ranks of an aging society, of course the hope is that someone soon busts out with an anti aging serum to extend the life of the user. Who would not want to spend more time with our loved ones and do this in reasonably good health. Someone once said that age is cruel, and it can be for those not prepared to handle it. It has also been said that “growing old isn’t for sissies” and no truer words have been spoken on the subject. Yet we would love nothing more than to squeeze a few more useful years out of what God gave us, provided we could do so with some modicum of dignity.
Anyone who has ever been ill to the point of incapacitation has some idea what an elderly individual must go through day in and day out, trying desperately to hang on to a life slipping away due to illness and a lack of viable treatment options. Add dementia to the picture and aging is a process that is almost to be feared unless good health can be maintained and the odds are against that happening.
The next half century will see dramatic advances in the field of life extension and it may be too late for many of us now in midlife to take full advantage of it. The process of aging will be transformed someday, too many people are expending too much time and money for it not to happen. The process will be gradual yet continuous and much of it will be investigating unknown territory, which will mean even more discoveries to help humankind along the medical research path. There will be ethical debates about treatments that not everyone will see as medical breakthroughs yet the momentum will persist. There is just too much at stake from a human and financial perspective, never mind the health care expenditure, not to explore anti aging and life extension to its fullest extent.
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