Beginning the Chase : Part 3

Chasing Life: New Discoveries in the Search for Immortality to Help You Age Less Today
by Sanjay Gupta, M.D.

(Page 3 of 4)

In many ways, it is much easier to describe aging than to define it. The symptoms of aging are both subtle and obvious. We don't see or hear as well, our hair turns gray, our skin wrinkles, our reflexes slow, our mind becomes less sharp, our muscles become weaker, our bones become more brittle, our lung capacity diminishes. These are the obvious signs of aging. Still, watching someone age is a lot like watching grass grow: if you look for changes every day, you will likely be disappointed. The aging process is a slow, ticking clock that makes each of us older next year.

Obviously, we don't all age at the same rate. Our clocks tick at different speeds. One person may be spry at eighty, while a second may be bedridden. Even in the same individual, change can occur at different speeds. Someone may be mentally sharp but suffer from heart disease. Another person may have weak eyes but healthy lungs. If we are lucky enough to make it to old age, we will certainly have a combination of strengths and weaknesses, compared to our peers.

One question we should ask - and I'll explore this in the book - is what keeps us from growing old even more quickly than we do. After all, we humans are relatively lucky. The longest-lived lion only makes it 30 years. Monkeys can live to 50 and eagles to 80. Only the turtle appears to have us beat on the longevity scale, with a maximum life span of about 150 years.

Not all creatures suffer the indignities of aging, though. Alligators, Galápagos tortoises, sharks, sturgeons, and lobsters keep on growing throughout their lives and show no obvious loss of function as they get older. The 50-year-old lobster will reportedly snap its claw closed just as quickly as a younger lobster.

Another important point: most of us would not choose to live longer for its own sake. We do not want to extend our years if that extra time on the planet lacks a certain quality of life. We want to live longer, but we want a sound mind and at least a minimally functional body when we do. Given the choice, most of us would surely choose to live like an incandescent bulb - shining brightly until the moment the light goes out. We want to live longer and die shorter. It would be ideal if we could live the majority of our lives with the body of a young teenager. Consider this: if we were able to maintain our body as it is when we're eleven - when our healing capacity is at its maximum - we could live for an estimated 1,200 years.

Currently, most of us reach our physical peak between twenty and thirty and begin a steady decline after that. By seventy, we have lost 40 percent of our maximum breathing capacity, muscle and bone mass have declined, body fat has increased, and sight and hearing have gotten worse. We may want to chase life and live longer, but not at the expense of function, both of mind and body.

Truth is, when it comes to extending life, remarkable progress has been made in the last century. In 1900, life expectancy in the United States was 47.3 years, but that was an average dragged down by the huge infant mortality rate. The three leading causes of death in the United States at that time were pneumonia and influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea and enteritis.

In fact, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, workers were actually considered lucky to reach retirement age. The average life expectancy was 64 years when the federal government cut the first monthly Social Security check to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont. Of course, if you were lucky enough to make it to 65, chances were you'd live another 12.7 years, having beaten some of the early killers - even back then. Ida May Fuller surprised everyone, including President Roosevelt. She lived to 100, while he only lived to the age of 63.

By the end of the twentieth century, U.S. life expectancy had risen to 76.9, and it continues to inch upward. At this writing, life expectancy for women in the United States is 80.4 years; for men, 75.2 years.

Public health measures such as ensuring clean drinking water and medical advances such as the discovery of antibiotics helped many more children survive into adulthood in the twentieth century. The challenge for science now is to help us survive and thrive in our golden years. The challenge is to help us chase life and also enjoy it.

Already, advances in medicine and public health have changed our concept of aging. Our expectations have grown. Technology has given us new faith in what is possible. Now, not only do we expect to make it to our seventies and beyond, but we want to remain physically and mentally active for years to come after that. We want our sixties and seventies to be a new beginning, not the beginning of the end. The good news is research has made tremendous advances, and there are many things we can do right now to improve the quality and length of our lives. And there are advances on the horizon that are more than promising.

Many researchers of aging prefer to consider what they call health span, not life span. They also use the term active life expectancy, meaning the number of years we can expect to live free of chronic functional impairments.

The goal of this book is to help you extend your active life. There is a lot of conflicting information out there, and I will distill it down for you and show the most effective choices you can make right now to improve your health and longevity. We all make choices every day that affect our lives. The sum of those decisions equals about 70 percent of the factors determining your life span. That fact alone should empower you to start making some changes that will increase your life span and your health span. Also, many choices you make as a young adult can have long-lasting consequences. Even at eighty, though, it is not too late to chase a longer, healthier life. I will shatter some myths along the way, and yes, I'll also talk about the cutting-edge science underway in labs around the world in such areas as stem cells, telomeres, nanotechnology, and more that may open the door to what some are already calling practical immortality. While I won't make you any false promises, you will be astounded at the small yet remarkably effective changes you can make today to put you on the path to chasing life. This book will explore where longevity research is heading and what you can do now - based on the latest research. How much can we do to alter our life expectancies? The short answer is plenty.

Copyright © 2007 by Sanjay Gupta, M.D.

About the Author

Sanjay Gupta, M.D., is a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital and associate chief of service at Grady Memorial Hospital. A columnist for TIME magazine and a chief medical correspondent at CNN, he lives in Atlanta, GA.