“Compression of Morbidity” and its Relationship to “Healthy Aging”

My colleague Laurel Terry sent a link to this week’s New York Times article that delves into the topic of “healthy aging.”  Thank you! While I can see “healthy aging”as a goal, I have to admit I had not thought carefully about what we mean with those words.  Jane Brody’s article, Finding a Drug for Healthy Aging, helps to explain, while also examining the latest push for medications that might serve the goal:

In 1980, Dr. James F. Fries, a Stanford University physician who studied chronic disease and aging, proposed that a “compression of morbidity” would enable most people to remain healthy until a certain age, perhaps 85, then die naturally or after only a brief illness.

 

Now, a group of experts on aging envisions a route to realizing Dr. Fries’s proposal: one or more drugs that can slow the rate of aging and the development of the costly, debilitating chronic ailments that typically accompany it. If successful, not only would their approach make healthy longevity a reality for many more people, but it could also save money. They say that even a 20 percent cut in how fast people age could save more than $7 trillion over the next half-century in the United States alone.

 

“Aging is by far the best predictor of whether people will develop a chronic disease like atherosclerotic heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia or osteoarthritis,” Dr. James L. Kirkland, director of the Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic, said in an interview. “Aging way outstrips all other risk factors.”

The practitioners of this field of study even have a name, geroscientists, “university scientists joined together by the American Federation of Aging Research to promote a new approach to healthier aging….”