HEALTHSPAN EXTENSION: The low-hanging fruit for longevity efforts?

Olshansky argues we should shift our attention to helping people live healthier lives, rather than simply focusing on overall lifespan. That’s a view shared by Juulia Jylhävä, a principal researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and a data scientist at MedEngine, a medical data science company based in Finland. “We should surely be more focused on healthspan and how to maintain not only health, but also functional abilities,” says Jylhävä.

Healthspan—years lived in good health—might be the unsexy cousin of longevity research, but figuring out ways for people to live healthier lives could have a much greater impact than extending lifespan by a few years. A big part of extending healthy lives is pinpointing when people start to decline in health, and what the early indicators of that decline might be. One way is by looking at frailty—a measure that usually takes into account factors like social isolation, mobility, and health conditions to produce an overall frailty score. In England, the National Health Service automatically calculates frailty scores for everyone aged 65 and over, with the aim to help people live independently for longer and avoid two major causes of hospital admissions for older people: falls and adverse responses to medication.

But Jylhävä’s research suggests that frailty indicators might be useful much earlier in life, too. She found that increased frailty scores were associated with higher mortality risks in old age, but that this association was particularly pronounced at age 50, where a jump in frailty score indicated a relatively large increase in mortality risk. Jylhävä says this is a sign that assessing frailty at age 65 is too late. Rather than looking to the ultra-old for the key to healthy aging, we should actually be looking at when and why younger people start the decline into ill health.

Exercise and a good diet will help. They’re not magic, but they’re what we have.