The Change Mariner

Expanding Life Expectancy in U.S.

Life in the Age of Old, Old Age

In the annals of human longevity, the Blaylock sisters represent a happy aberration, an anomaly so rare that they have donated blood for the sake of genetic research. They have all sailed past the current life expectancy of 79 for women in the United States, showing little serious wear along the way. The three sisters over 85 have beaten the unnervingly high odds of developing Alzheimer's (50-50 for people that age and older), and all four have survived bouts with at least one of the most common causes of death for women -- heart disease, cancer and stroke. It's tempting to say that the sisters look young for their ages, but in Audry's case, at least, there isn't much basis for comparison: there are fewer than 70,000 centenarians in the United States.

Over the coming decades, though, researchers expect that figure to jump. Even conservative demographers predict that there will be 10 times the current number of centenarians in 2050, when what remains of the boomers -- the generation born between 1946 and 1964, a group representing one-third of the U.S. population -- hits old, old age. According to United Nations population projections, close to 1 in 20 American boomers are expected to live to 100, thanks to breakthroughs in treatments for heart disease and cancer, lives relatively free of hard labor and longstanding memberships at the gym. Those centenarians may not even be the most senior members of society, either -- the National Institute on Aging predicts that the boomers will be playing bridge with a growing number of people 110 and older, or supercentenarians. Demography, of course, is a game of interpretation. (Some contrarian experts predict that life expectancy will decline if obesity rates keep escalating.) But if American demographers have made one mistake consistently over the past two centuries, it's underestimating the rate at which life expectancy has grown.

The quickening pace of biotechnology might also add to the longevity boom. Some of the country's top cellular biologists will sit in their offices at Harvard and M.I.T. and announce, their faces alternately grave and gleeful, that within the next 10 to 30 years a drug will appear on the market that will slow down the process of aging. They point to recent examples of yeast cells and worms and lab mice whose life spans they have extended as much as five times as long with feats of genetic manipulation, and they suggest that they will be able to achieve more modest results in humans. They don't talk about immortality, but they do talk about healthy centenarians.

Posted by Bob King at February 20, 2004 03:56 PM | TrackBack
Related Categories: Area - Social - Demographics | Industry - Healthcare | Quadrant - Social | Theme - 'Boomers Battle Aging'

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