We have heard a lot recently about the potential for increased longevity. Scientific and medical advancements, such as breakthroughs in genomic sciences, stem cell treatments, and biomedical engineering, are driving this. It seems that all of these are progressing at a greater speed now that we have entered an era of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
While living longer seems to be a great and noble goal for most people, it's crucial to understand that the quality of those years is equally important. This brings us to today's topic, the difference between health span and lifespan. An April 2023 article from Fortune magazine describes the differential as follows: Lifespan is the number of years someone lives from birth until death, while health span is the number of years someone is healthy without chronic and debilitating disease. It's not just about living longer, but about living healthier for longer, a goal that we can actively work towards.
Source: Research Gate
In every financial planning and retirement planning discussion we have with clients, one of the uncomfortable conversations we have is around longevity and life expectancy assumptions. You see, if you retire at age 62 and live to age 85, you need enough money to last for those 23 years of retirement life. However, if you lived five years longer and had not accumulated the resources during your working years to provide for this, the outcome could be very disappointing for you and your family.
We always start this conversation by asking you about your personal and family health histories. Perhaps we should change the question from “How long do you think you’ll live?” to “What is your life expectancy goal?” Somewhere in your mind, you have a number or an aspirational goal. Where did this number come from? Are scientific and medical advancements giving you reasons and confidence to push that number higher? If so, we need to make certain that we have enough in the way of income and asset resources to provide the quality of life you seek during these additional years.
I have mentioned previously in these blog posts that I subscribe to Peter H. Diamandis, MD, newsletter, The Abundance Blog. It is a fascinating and encouraging look at the future practical applications of scientific advancements in many areas of life, including health care, finance, material sciences, agriculture, manufacturing, and robotics.
Peter Diamandis has recently been writing extensively about what he described as the coming health span revolution – during the next decade, he believes that we will witness the convergence of AI, quantum, gene therapies, CRISPR, cellular medicines, and epigenetic re-programming converging with the promise of adding decades to our health span. This concept is known as longevity escape velocity.
Peter's friends and fellow scientists, Ray Kurzweil, Co-Founder of Singularity University and Futurist at Google, and Aubrey de Grey, a leading biomedical gerontologist, have stated, “Today, by some estimates, science is adding about three months to your lifespan every year. In the near future, additional scientific breakthroughs will extend your lifespan by more than a year for every year you remain alive. Once that happens, we have reached Longevity Escape Velocity.”
Let's explore a couple of examples of recent breakthroughs and what this could mean for both life span and health span in the future.
A recent research article from our friends at Capital Group and the American Funds addresses new gene editing advancements. The article describes this healthcare innovation that allows scientists to manipulate human DNA and find new ways to treat diseases. Scientists and biomedical engineers have now created a real world treatment for the life-shortening disease sickle cell — the first approval based on a revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. It appears that the market for gene editing and its potential solutions or treatments for various illnesses and ailments could expand greatly over the coming decade, as you can see in the chart below.
Source: Statista. As of January 2023. CRISPR stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats."
Next, let's look at a new drug approval that could give cancer patients more hope and optimism. Just 3% of patients with small-cell lung cancer that has metastasized to other parts of the body live more than five years. Often, their life expectancy is just 4-5 months after diagnosis. However, a new FDA-approved drug could change all of this. Roughly 2.2 million people are diagnosed with lung cancer worldwide every year, and approximately 330,000 of these are small-cell lung cancers. The new drug is a T–cell engager, which is designed to redirect the body’s immune system's T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. It’s another important step towards customizable medicine.
I will finish with an excerpt from a recent article from Peter Diamandis that explores these topics in more detail. I strongly encourage you to follow him and subscribe to his newsletter if you would like more interesting and encouraging information and perspective. It is an extraordinarily refreshing point of view in today's negative news landscape.
“How long you live is a function of many factors: where you were born, your genetics, your diet, and your mindset. Most people imagine that longevity is mostly inherited and that the genetic cards you are dealt have predetermined your lifespan. You may be surprised by the truth. In 2018, after the analysis of a 54-million-person ancestry database, scientists announced that lifespan has little to do with genes. In fact, heritability is accountable for roughly 7% of your longevity. The highest estimates for heritability verge around 30%—which still means, at a minimum, you’re 70% in control of how you age. The power of shaping your health span is much more in your hands than you might have imagined.”
I ask you to consider what you would do with an additional 10, 20, or even 30 years of healthy life. We should be thinking about this question not only for our lives but also for the lives of our children and grandchildren. There are actually positive and exciting things happening in the world. It is unfortunate that they don't get as much press and screen time as all the negative news and noise. As we move into the summer months, prior to the Presidential conventions and upcoming elections, I thought this would be a more fun and positive topic to explore as we continue “Moving Life Forward.”
© 2024 Jesse Hurst
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Featured blog image source: iStock.com/AdrianHillman