tsunami will be made up of baby boomers, who were arguably the first generation to fully benefit from all the advances of modern medicine. Everyone else will be a part of subsequent waves. And as even more sophisticated medical technologies emerge, science will likely push the boundaries of life expectancy once again. All that longevity comes at a price. Healthy adults will retire later, which means that the people we vote into government will have to reconsider retirement ages and benefits, and people who run businesses will have to change the way they staff their companies. Traditional hierarchies may be overturned. Many older people may find themselves taking lower-level positions, reporting to people who are actually their junior in age but their senior in authority.
Another thing to consider is that more living people will mean more ill people, and so along with increased numbers of older people we can expect that the cost of healthcare will increase as well. Not just for the government, but for private insurance companies, and for women everywhere. Why women? Because when it comes to caring for sick and ageing spouses, parents, siblings, in-laws, and friends, it is women who are most likely to take on the responsibility of caregiving. Sixty-six per cent of caregivers in the US are female. In the years ahead, more women than ever before will be called on to be caretakers for ageing partners and relatives, a duty that will cost them in terms of both their physical and financial health.
Women’s caretaking in the United States is valued from $148 billion to $188 billion annually. Given that the ability to provide care for others reduces the hours women are able to work by around 40 per cent, the total cost to an individual caretaker over time will be more than $300,000. It is known that long-term caregivers are likely to suffer the ill effects of stress, and are more likely to retire early with reduced pensions due to their reduced work hours.
The forecast for the silver tsunami is that it will affect all of us, and the impact will be personal and national, physical and emotional, economic and social and political, even environmental. Our planet will also pay the price as natural resources are stretched beyond limits to support so many more lives.
Did that forecast just throw a spanner into your excitement about living a longer life? Well, I urge you to take this information and add it to your own personal equation of how you’d like to proceed as an ageing human, and specifically, as an ageing woman – and then do your best not only to appreciate this extra time, but also to learn as much as possible about caring for yourself in the very best way that you can, and to encourage the loved ones that you are taking the journey with to care for themselves as best they can. I believe that is our smartest strategy moving forwards. It is the only strategy, really.
With the awareness that this wave is on its way, the most important thing we can do for our families and ourselves is to be strong enough to surf it.
SINCE SUCH EXTENDED LIFE spans are unprecedented, it makes sense that the study of the effects of longevity is also still in its infancy. The branch of the primary US agency dedicated to the research and understanding of ageing was born around the same time that I was, in the early 1970s. It was only in 1974 that the National Institute on Aging (or NIA) was established, one of the twenty-seven institutes and centres that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US’s federally run medical research institute.
The NIA funds research aimed at understanding ageing and improving healthy living as we age. It is also the primary federal funder of Alzheimer’s research, which consumes much of its approximately one-billion-dollar budget for research grants (1/400th of the total NIH budget is dedicated to funding ageing research). Some of that budget was spent in 2007 to kick-start the emerging field of geroscience; the NIH gave the Buck Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center, $25 million to study ageing and its link to chronic diseases.
When we were travelling across the country in November and December 2014 to learn about the science of ageing, we met with a group of researchers who were in the midst of publishing a collaborative paper called “Geroscience” (you can look it up and read it online in the journal Cell if you like). Their paper made a compelling argument for a new, interdisciplinary approach to ageing research.
Its authors are a mix of highly regarded scientists. Some, like Dr Brian Kennedy at the Buck Institute, lead research initiatives for nonprofit organizations that study ageing; others, like Dr Elissa Epel at the University of California, teach and conduct research at major universities; and still others, like Dr Felipe Sierra, the director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, hold leadership positions at government-funded entities. The publication of this paper marked the first time that scientists from the private sector, academia, government, and independent organizations came together to collectively investigate a new way to study ageing. It also marked the first time that scientists from across a range of disciplines – from cell biologists to geneticists, endocrinologists, pharmacologists, and mathematicians – collaborated on this common goal.
And the authors of the paper suggested something revolutionary: that future research should approach the various diseases of ageing as having a single shared root cause – ageing itself.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF GEROSCIENCE
The field of geroscience aims to understand the relationship between ageing and age-related diseases. The word root “gero” is derived from the name of the Greek god of ageing, Geras. In classical Greek mythology, most of the gods were represented as young, strong, and beautiful human-like creatures, but elderly Geras was depicted as shrivelled and small. While he may not have been as buff as Zeus, Geras – which translates to mean “gift of honor”, or “privilege of age”, or “reward” – had other attributes to offer. Because as youth flees, we gain honour, courage, wisdom, experience, and other rewards.
The term “geroscience” feels apt as we study the new science of getting older, as Geras offers the perfect metaphor for the human relationship with ageing: a fear of physical weakening coupled with the awareness that without years, without experience, the gifts of a life well spent cannot be fully realized. Today, geroscience is attempting to reconcile these two views by investigating how we can remain strong and vital as we age.
According to geroscientists, ageing is the biggest single risk factor for chronic illnesses like cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and neurodegeneration (including Alzheimer’s). For decades, medicine has been studying the chronic diseases related to ageing separately instead of collectively. By looking at heart disease as distinct from cancer as distinct from Alzheimer’s, we miss a valuable opportunity to understand what they might all have in common. The radical question posited by the field of geroscience is: What if there were a different way to understand the process of ageing and, in doing so, alter our rate of ageing?
Dr Gordon Lithgow, an expert in ageing and genetics who is the principal investigator and director of the Buck Institute’s Interdisciplinary Research Consortium on Geroscience, explained to us how the past revelations that have lengthened our life spans may mirror today’s discoveries about ageing. In the nineteenth century, life expectancy increased when scientists realized that many of the diseases that
