"I hear a rumour...Jack Sparrow's in London, hell-bent to find the Fountain of Youth." ―Joshamee Gibbs. Pirates of the Caribbean IV ‘On Stranger Tides’.
Was he coming to see me? Maybe. Although had he crossed paths with Ponce De Leon on his voyage, he would’ve been pointed in the opposite direction.
Legend has it that (Juan) Ponce De Leon thought that the Fountain of Youth was in Florida, and that drinking from its waters would restore ones youth.
Had Jack stayed in the Caribbean and spoken to the locals, they may have saved Jackie the trouble of an arduous voyage. The indigenous people had a legend of a mythical land called Bimini flowing with waters that had similar curative properties.
In Ancient Hebrew and Arabic writings there is reference to what is commonly known as the Philosophers Stone but was given many alternate names throughout history. It was thought that ingestion of the Philosophers Stone would regenerate the body to its optimal state. Long after these stories, the 16th Century became quite a hotbed of research into the Philososphers Stone, in fact, Sir Issac Newton seemed from all accounts more driven by this search than any other.
So, throughout Human history there are numerous stories of eternal youth, advanced age and even immortality. As a species, it seems, we’ve always been fascinated by longevity. But what is the real story of Human longevity?
If you were born in the UK back in the middle-ages, your average life expectancy would have been 35 years. This is an average, so the large numbers of childhood deaths would skew the figure to the left. But you would have been quite a rare individual to have made it to our version of ‘middle age’ in the middle-ages.
Fast forward 300 years to the 1900’s. For numerous reasons 20th Century living endowed ‘older age’ on a larger percentage of the population. At this point the average life expectancy was 47 for gentlemen and 50 for ladies. So in a third of a Millennium, a literal blink of an eye in Human evolution, UK residents had ‘gained’ an additional 15 years. Still, 50, is not really ‘aged’, as we would consider it.
Skipping another century and a bit, where are we at in the UK in the 21st century? The latest figures I have at hand are for the period 2007-09 which shows that life expectancy is 77.85 for us men, and 82.01 for the women. So in the last century, again due to many reasons, our life expectancy has risen once more by about 30 years.
Not bad.
However…
Life Expectancy is quite an ambiguous term. For example, we can keep people alive using machines for a substantial amount of time even with multiple organ failure. This would obviously increase lifespan, but I think you can see the glaringly obvious problem with that statistic. So, what to do?
Well, we do have a better measure called, surprisingly, Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE). There is also another similar measure called Disability Free Life Expectancy (DFLE), that has a slightly different criteria within its remit. We will stick to the HLE statistic here.
The HLE is a bit more telling. Especially when we look at the ‘at birth’ figures.
Although as we’ve seen, the LE figures have risen, the HLE figures haven’t quite kept pace, not by a long shot. The 2007 figure of HLE is 62.7 years for males and 64.4 years for females. This means that at around 60 years of age, our health has deteriorated so much that we are now considered unhealthy enough to be considered as having a disability or living in a diseased state. And this is for the last 15 years of your life.
To get to the stage where a condition is deemed a disability or disease state, doesn’t happen over night. That’s not the way disease works. For many diseases the incubation period is not measured in days, weeks, months and usually not in years either. For disease to take hold, your body would have been in a sub-disease state probably for 5-10 years or more. How often have you heard ‘I don’t understand it, he/ she was so healthy, then all of a sudden, they went downhill’. That’s what happens at the end stage, the progression of the disease is exponential. But the beginning stages are usually very slow and subtle, which is why they do not show up as symptoms or even in most regular medical checks.
It seems for all our advances in modern life in the last century, we’ve only seemed to have gained and extra 5-10 years of healthy life, and that’s probably due the fact that we haven’t had to contend with a World War (1, 2 and the 7 Year War) that our recent ancestors did.
So what to do?
Well, that’s the question isn’t it. What to do? As I’ve said in many of my articles, the general public’s source of scientific information is usually via today’s popular media. Unfortunately they are not very good at representing the state of our knowledge. If you rely on the TV or the newspapers, especially the red tops, to provide your information, you may want to seriously reconsider what you actually know.
The current state of science, if adopted, could see a 30 year old body opening a lovely letter by the Queen (or King?) wishing them well in celebrating a century. That is, a Chronologically old person who is Biologically young.
But that situation is the capstone on the pyramid. For the capstone to be set in place, the foundations need to be strong, very strong.
How do we achieve this? First you need to identify the major risk factors for the most prevalent diseases. Once identified, you need to take steps to stop or reverse their progression, much easier to do when they are in the birthing stages. So the time to begin an anti ageing lifestyle is now.
Sounds difficult? Not really. The biggest killer is still Circulatory disease, this combination accounts for about 33% of all deaths. The second biggest cause of death is Cancer which comes in at 29%. Next is Respiratory disease which has a slightly lower percentage of 14%. All three of these disease states have very similar causes, so by addressing one aspect, you’ve reduced your chance of dying by 76% Not bad, huh?
What we need to do now is know how good, or bad, shape we are in and take steps to remedy the situation. What I’ll do over the next few months, is give you a brief overview of some of the most important measures for health. These are taken from the HPC-UK anti-ageing program, where I measure 35 (depending on the individual) different indices known as biomarkers of ageing. Once you know your score, you can work out your Biological age for that measure and compare it to your Chronological age. The further it is above your own age, the more important it is to focus on bringing down that measure. I may even give a few hints on how to address the problem, although, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, I can’t go into too much detail. I have to eat too.
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