Old Age 2.0
Is it possible to cure a person of old age?
Maria Ramzayeva, Slon
People have always been looking for the secrets of longevity and now, it would seem, they are closer than ever to discovering it: we live three to four times longer than our ancestors, life expectancy is only growing. But did humanity strive for this? We prolong not youth, but old age, we do not live, but we get sick longer. Brian Kennedy, Director General of the Institute for Anti-Aging Research, told about all this, as well as about the cause of aging and whether it can be "canceled" at the lecture "Old Age 2.0" as part of the "Forecast for Tomorrow" cycle on the Digital October platform. Slon gives its abbreviated version. (The full video recording of the lecture with simultaneous translation is available on the Digital October – VM website).
The great Emperor Qin Shi Huang, famous for uniting China and creating a terracotta army, decided to live forever and ordered his healers to find a cure for death. They considered that mercury was the active ingredient of the elixir of eternal youth, and gave it to the emperor a little every day. Unfortunately, it was mercury that eventually killed the emperor. Qin Shi Huang's example was unsuccessful. But he was not the only one who wanted to live forever, and people did not give up trying to find a way to cancel death or at least significantly delay it, and now we have made significant progress on this issue.
The good news is that life expectancy rates are rising all over the world. It has been calculated that every four years they increase by an average of a year, so that you sort of get back 20 percent of the years you have lived.
In Japan, life expectancy rates are growing rapidly. Over four decades, they have increased by 20 years, and the expected average life expectancy has reached 85 years. In the USA, progress is not so fast – the increase is only five years. But what is much more interesting is that if in the USA the life expectancy of men increased by 4.2 years from 1990 to 2010, then the healthy life expectancy increased by only 2.7. We will see approximately the same ratio all over the world, not only in America. It is also true for women.
If such a difference between the indicators persists, we will come to what one reporter predicted after seeing the results of the study: "You will live, but in such a way that you would rather die." We are not increasing the duration of life, but the duration of the disease.
Unhealthy old age is a nightmare not only for the elderly, but also for the economy Of course, it's great that grandparents and even great-grandparents stay with us longer, help raise children and share their experiences with the young, but an increase in "unhealthy" life expectancy will soon lead to a huge number of problems.
In 2002, a high percentage of people over 60 (more than 20% of the population) was observed only in Western Europe and parts of Asia, but by 2050, such indicators will be in most countries of the world. By that time, there will be 9 billion of us, and 2 billion over 60 years old. What does this mean if we take into account that most of them will have various chronic diseases and will be incapacitated? We will come to the point that there will simply not be enough working people who can provide for the maintenance of so many old people!
Maintaining health in old age is not only a question of the quality of life of the elderly. The global economy needs people over 60 to be healthy and able to work. Otherwise, the economy will collapse due to the cost of their maintenance.
Are people not made for such a long life?Our world is different from the one in which our ancestors lived.
By conducting an age analysis of the bones, archaeologists found that the average life span was 20-30 years, and it has been like this for thousands of years! People did not die because of old age, often - just at birth or from malnutrition, or from infections and similar causes. Very few lived to an advanced age.
Only in the last 200-300 years the life span has grown significantly, and now we live in a world to which we are not evolutionarily adapted. The theory was born that our bodies are not designed for such a long life.
They are designed to procreate as soon as possible – to ensure the survival of the species, pass on their genes to their descendants and die. And now we live much longer than the period necessary for reproduction and are looking for opportunities to prolong life even more.
So are we doomed and must obey the laws of nature? Is it just routine? No. And I can show it on my grandmothers. They both lived a long life – 99 and 101 years, but it is interesting to compare them. One of the problems started at the age of 60, she had to take a huge amount of pills, and she lived the last years struggling with increasing dementia. While the other drove a car until the age of 93, thought clearly and lived independently until the last years.
A long and healthy life is possible. But we would like to ensure that every person in old age lives like my second grandmother: healthy, independent and happy. And I am sure that we will succeed.
Causes of unhealthy old age – old age itself Why is old age a problem for a healthy life?
You all probably already know the answer. The older a person gets, the more rapidly his probability of getting sick with almost any disease that exists in modern society increases. Think about some kind of chronic disease. Diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease... you can continue by yourself. What unites them? The age at which they most often occur.
At the same time, the standard approach to treatment is as follows: specialists try to understand how the disease occurs, then find a cure for it. In the last 70 years, we have been attacking one disease after another and trying to learn how to cure them. It is effective with bacteria and viruses, but in the treatment of cancer, Alzheimer's disease and many other ailments, alas, we are defeated. It is possible to slow down their development, for example, now in the United States, a cancer patient after being diagnosed will live two to three times longer than before, but most often it does not work to overcome this disease.
It seems to us that a new approach is needed. Instead of treating each disease separately, you need to focus on the main factor provoking most of them – old age. With age, something changes in the body, and this triggers the development of Alzheimer's, cataracts, diabetes. And it is with old age that we need to fight.
If we succeed, people will live longer, staying healthy, we will prevent the occurrence of most age-related diseases. As I always say: the easiest way to cure Alzheimer's is to make sure that they do not get sick.
Is it possible to cure old age? There are many theories about why the body ages, and, most likely, the truth lies in the combination of these ideas.
But first of all, it is important for our institute to understand why the aging process triggers chronic diseases and how we can prevent it.
We have many so-called model organisms that can be used to study aging processes. They are divided into two groups. The first is simple organisms, such as yeast, flies, worms, they age very quickly (yeast and worms live for about two weeks, and flies live for two months), we could conduct mini-experiments on them. They cost a penny, and you can afford to have billions of such test subjects in the laboratory. This is important because this way you can sort them out by genes, find out which one accelerates aging and which one allows you to live longer. After 30 years of hard work, we identified the genes that affect aging, and were able to move on to the second group of models – more complex animals, such as mice and monkeys. It was important to understand whether the hypotheses put forward in the course of working with simple beings were applicable to them. Mice and monkeys are much closer to humans, and the patterns that we will deduce from them are likely to be applicable to humans. The problem is that even mice age much more slowly, their lifespan is about three to four years. Every time I want to investigate one gene mutation, it costs me thousands of dollars and several years of waiting.
But by combining the two approaches, putting forward hypotheses with the help of simple creatures and testing them on more complex animals, we are making rapid progress in the study of aging. The organisms we study have a number of common genes. The mouse and the worm have a common protein TOR, which is responsible for the behavior of the cell. It is he who tells the cell to divide and grow, and he, in a stressful situation, for example, when there are few calories, tells it to stop dividing and growing, thereby forcing the cell to live longer.
Recently, we tested rapamycin on mice, which affects the production of TOR, and it turned out that it works! Moreover, the substance not only prolongs the life of the mouse, but, most importantly, the term of its healthy life. Rapamycin slows down age-related changes, fights Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cardiovascular diseases and others. Studies have shown that rapamycin has a good effect on the condition of patients, but it has side effects, and it is not yet possible to use it on people, especially healthy ones. Therefore, the main task now is to alter rapamycin, change it so that only a positive effect remains.
Compare: if you cure all cancer patients over the age of 50, the average life expectancy will increase by three years. But if we achieve the same effect of rapamycin on humans as we observe in mice, it will give humanity as much as 12 years.
But rapamycin is not the only option. Many other developments are underway now. Soon there will be medicines of a completely different level than now. We are on the threshold of a medical revolution, and I am sure that in the future people in middle age will take medications proactively, thereby preserving youth for many years longer.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru15.11.2013