Americans are living longer, healthier, more active lives. They are staying in the workforce longer and investing more in the economy. Gray is the new gold.
Growing older, however, often means a decline in health and greater susceptibility to chronic conditions like arthritis and dementia, as well as increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer, placing burdens on both family and society.
Scientists are making discoveries every day about how aging works and how to keep it from slowing us down so that we stay healthier and feel younger longer. Dietary changes, genetic engineering and hormone activity can all play a role in the aging of the body's systems. Scientists are discovering that the aging of those systems can be delayed and thereby delay the onset of deadly diseases.
Slowing the aging process is not a new idea, and there is no quick fix or magic mirror, but with greater public focus on the advantages of a senior workforce and a greater investment in the biology of aging, we can turn gray into gold by helping older Americans remain healthy, productive members of society.
One of the challenges facing us as a society is that we tend to look at diseases on an individual basis rather than take the body as a whole, and this creates tunnel vision.
"We don't pay much attention to you until you're sick," says Dr. S. Mitchell Harman, director and president of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute (KLRI) in Arizona, a not-for-profit research organization that conducts clinical research on the prevention of age-related diseases and the extension of healthy human life. "Most of the cancer drugs make you sick and interventions are expensive and hard on the patients," he adds. "If we could stop that cancer in the first place, wouldn't we be much better off?"(1)
1. Harman, SM [phone interview 2006 Dec 20].
2. Butler R. Do Health and Longevity Create Wealth? Lieberman Memorial Lecture. University of California, San Francisco; 2006 Oct 10.
