Aging is getting so old.
Paul McCartney, who turned 80 in June, likes to limit his workouts by balancing on his head, feet in the air, for five minutes and assigns yoga eye exercises (look up, center, down, diagonally, then around and around) to keep your vision sharp.
Gloria Steinem, 88, offers the guest room of her Manhattan home to American women seeking abortions. “Don’t agonize. Organize,” the pro-choice feminist icon said after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Harrison Ford, who turned 80 in July, has a fifth Indiana Jones film planned for next year. Beloved British actor Patrick Stewart, 82, who shares Ford’s birthday, recently wrapped filming the third season of his Star Trek: Picard series and was still rocking a toned body and biceps at 75. The “Jeanie Dreaming” star Barbara Eden (91 in August) does resistance training and eats like a carnivore. “I like steak.”
In Canada, Jean Chrétien, 88, is as “funny and sharp” as ever and was recently named the most popular prime minister in modern Canadian history. Gordon Lightfoot, 83, who has a steel rod and 10 pins in his right wrist after breaking a joint last fall, is among the planned headliners at this summer’s Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. “None of us are getting any younger,” the legendary octogenarian singer-songwriter told the Toronto Sun last fall. “We are all aware of that. And if we can do it, we might as well do it.”
And, yes, they do. “Eighty is the new 60,” or so goes the loud trope. Life extension is one of the great medical and social miracles of the last century. Life expectancy in Canada in 1900 was 51. When Parliament passed the Health Care Act in 1966, men could expect to see their high 60s, women 75. Now we’re just under 80 for men and 84 for the women. Almost one in five of us is 65 or older. Centenarians, 100 and older, are the fastest growing age group in the country.
“This is the triumph of aging,” said Dr. Sameer Sinha, director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network in Toronto. “We’re seeing many more people, incredible numbers, living to much older ages and surviving to those ages in relatively good health.”
It’s true that people who get to 100 and over don’t necessarily get there in perfect health; half will live with some form of cognitive impairment, even though they cope with problems like heart problems or stroke remarkably well. And yes, people are living longer, but not universally or uniformly.
It largely benefits the rich and the middle class, said bioethicist Arthur Kaplan. “In some countries, if you make it to 50, you’re lucky.” The poor don’t live longer, said Kaplan, head of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. Almost eight million adults in Canada are obese. Moderate obesity takes an average of three years off a person’s life. Severe obesity, 10 years.
Women usually outlive men. Those types of demographics are getting lost in the “80s are the new 60s” hype, Kaplan said. “Are you getting top-notch health care? Do you have access to a good, varied and nutritious diet? do you exercise Have you ever been in a situation where there wasn’t a lot of stress and anxiety?’
“There are hints of what’s going on” — diet, decent health care, more healthy habits, more years in school, it helps to be rich — “that don’t involve big mysteries.”
Fewer children dying from childhood infections and diseases, more women surviving childbirth, sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, earlier and better management of high blood pressure and coronary artery disease, and advances in cancer care also brought us here. “In the 1960s and 1970s, we started to realize that smoking was really bad for you,” said Dr. Thomas Pearls, director of the large and ongoing New England Centenarian Study. Turn 65 in Canada today and you can expect about 20 years of life expectancy ahead of you, Sinha said. “The good news is that fewer of those extra years will be spent in poor health.” Things that would have killed us decades ago, like a heart attack or a stroke — now I have people who have had multiple heart attacks and strokes and they’re still going, and you’re like, ‘Wow,’ because of the advent of medical science.”
Dementia is among the most terrible diseases of old people. But because of efforts to identify and modify risk factors such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, “we actually have fewer people living with dementia today than we thought we would have 10 or 20 years ago,” Sinha said.
Much of the antiaging focus is not on the radical life extension or ageless bodies envisioned by the immortals, but rather on “morbidity compression,” avoiding the bad stuff until the later years of life and delaying the onset of age-related dysfunction , so people live well and then die suddenly. You’re here and then you’re gone.
The oldest person in history is Jean Calman, a French woman who died aged 122 in 1997 and who was still riding a bicycle at 100 and chain smoking until she was 117. A Japanese woman, Kana Tanaka, died in April at the age of 119. She was talkative, liked soft drinks and board games, and worked until she was 103.
In the fields of aging and longevity, many millions are immersed in regenerative medicine — using cell-based therapies to reprogram cells and return them to younger states to repair or replace damaged tissue, from battered joint cartilage to scarred heart muscle. Researchers are testing the potential of metformin, the world’s most widely prescribed diabetes drug, and other “senolytic” drugs to clear out undead senescent cells, so-called zombie cells that are exhausted and old and have stopped reproducing but refuse to die . Instead, they shrivel up, releasing inflammatory molecules that cause age-related tissue damage throughout the body.
Another movement is to push out lifespans through genetic enhancement, finding ways to manipulate or mimic “survival” genes that increase longevity. Forget about free radicals and let’s all drop the antioxidant theory, says Harvard molecular biologist David Sinclair. “We have the technology, I’m telling you today, to be able to get into our hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in our 70s, heart disease in our 80s and Alzheimer’s in our 90s,” Sinclair told the recent edition of the Life Itself 2022 conference. “This is the world to come. It’s not really a question of whether. The question is literally when. And for most of us, it will happen in our lifetime.
Why do we age at all? Sinclair uses the analogy of a sliced compact disc to explain what he calls his information theory of aging. “We’re not so much losing the digital music in the cell, the genes,” he said, but the epigenetic information, the systems in the body that read DNA and tell genes to turn on or off. “A skin cell doesn’t want to include the same genes as a brain cell. That would be a problem.” Genes that are not needed are bundled together. But like a scratched CD, the epigenome gets messed up over time by DNA damage, and these packages start to unravel. Genes that should be turned on are turned off and vice versa. Cells lose their identity and function, Sinclair told the audience. “That’s why we get old, why we get sick, and why most of us die.” His team is working on a way to “polish” the CD to make the cells work properly again and reverse age-related diseases such as glaucoma. In one experiment, they made blind mice see again.
Inflammation or inflammasome aging, chronic, low-grade inflammation that builds up over time through diet, infections, and environmental exposures, has also been implicated. Yet there is no single, ordered biological mechanism that explains biological aging, said Parminder Raina, a professor at McMaster University and lead principal investigator of the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging. His team has a new paper, not yet published but under review, that finds that people with early childhood adversity — sexual, physical or emotional abuse, parental conflict — age faster. They have faster epigenetic clocks than children who have not been exposed to these traumas.
“We need to understand what normal aging looks like. Once we know that, it might give us some insight into what early intervention might help,” said Raina, who at 62 is in better physical shape than she was in her 30s.
In some countries, if you get to 50, you’re lucky
He runs, runs, walks, swims, eats healthy, plays golf. Social engagement is important to him. But he doesn’t like the “80 is the new” fill-in-the-blank. This implies a certain level of ageism. There is a huge amount of heterogeneity in how we age, he says. Some age well, despite challenges, others, disease-free, not so well. Having a sense of purpose is crucial. “Losing a target is a deadly phenomenon,” Raina said. “Above all else, if we can get people to think about how they live, how they engage, how they participate in their communities, what creates purpose, that will take us further down the path of healthy life expectancy than any drug , drug or biological pathways discoveries will ever work.”
The human body is like any machine. “There is wear and tear over time no matter what we do. And that will catch up.”
Our life expectancy is not increasing as fast as it used to be. There are more centenarians. “But overall, we’re not turning 90 as fast as we saw earlier in the last 20, 30 years,” Raina said. COVID-19 has already reduced life expectancy in dozens of countries. In Canada, deaths due to…
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