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LONGER, BUT
ALSO HEALTHIER
New treatments may unlock improved wellness in advancing years.
LONGER, BUT ALSO HEALTHIER New treatments may unlock improved wellness in advancing years.

LONGER, BUT ALSO HEALTHIER: New treatments may unlock improved wellness in advancing years.

When a meteorologist forecasts severe weather, we can take precautions and plan accordingly. If a stock analyst predicts a market downturn, investors can modify their portfolios to reduce their exposure. Now, thanks to new innovations in health care technology, physicians also can provide a glimpse of the risk factors you may face as you age. That means you can take steps to reduce those risks now, and perhaps even alter your aging process in the future.

“In the field of medicine now, we have converging technologies that are going to disrupt how we do health care,” says William Kapp, founder and CEO of Longevity Solutions, a proactive precision diagnostics company in Naples. “The problem is trying to predict or give you insights into what your current status of health is prior to you developing something. We’re right at the cusp of being able to say, ‘This is your genetic profile, this is what you’re at risk for.’ Or we can do a whole-body MRI and show you with relative specificity if you’re showing any early signs of these disease processes.”

According to Kapp, the whole-body MRI can detect cancers, aneurysms, fatty liver disease and more, while genome sequencing can identify a patient’s risks for hypertension, heart disease, dementia, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. And while medical science has traditionally viewed aging as an inevitable biological process, Kapp said we can take steps now to mitigate the risks that come with aging.

“We can take this deep-dive assessment of you. Once you have the diagnosis, the question is, ‘What do you do next?’” he says. “Instead of managing your aging process into decline, we can optimize your aging process and hopefully avoid those age-related diseases. The idea is to make you CEO of your own health caregiving you enough data points that you can now, in your pocket, carry more information on your phone than your physician is ever going to have about you.”

While Kapp works to give patients a glimpse of their future health risks and ways to reduce those risks, another expert, S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health, said that new health care technologies have the potential to offer a therapeutic intervention that will actually slow the process of aging and extend human lifespans even further.

“Just trying to make ourselves live longer unless we know we’re going to be healthy along the way, is not a good idea,” Olshansky says. “A new paradigm is worth pursuing, and this new paradigm says the best approach— the primary prevention—is not attacking one disease at a time, but instead attacking the underlying risk factor for all of them, which is

the biological process of aging. That field of science (therapeutic intervention) is on the verge of a breakthrough in making that happen.”

One of those interventions is a medication called metformin, which Olshansky said is normally used to treat diabetes. However, a side effect of metformin appears to be a slowdown in the rate of aging and a reduced risk for cancer, heart disease and stroke. While the use of metformin as an agent to slow aging will enter clinical trials later this year, it’s not the only exciting advance in slowing the aging process.

“There’s another intervention called senolytic compounds. These are compounds that essentially remove garbage cells from the body. We call them zombie cells. These are cells that are still alive, but they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Olshansky says. “You want these non-functioning cells to disappear, but when they hang around, they cause inflammation and all kinds of bad stuff. Senolytic compounds essentially serve like Drano for zombie cells.”

Olshansky cautioned that, even if the new intervention therapies prove successful, you won’t be able to become a younger version of yourself. However, having a better vision of one’s health risks and the potential to slow the aging process could prove significant in allowing people to better manage their own health and that of their family, while also planning to protect their personal finances.

“If you saw a headline tomorrow morning that said, ‘Cure for cancer discovered,’ you would think that this was a big deal. If we find an intervention to slow aging, that makes a cure for cancer look like nothing by comparison,” he says. “We’ve actually now already succeeded in slowing aging in other species, so it’s not hypothetical anymore. So, this breakthrough that we’re talking about is an epic breakthrough.”

 

CAN HEALTH CARE KEEP UP?

Though the steps being taken to slow the process of aging and help people live longer are promising, the number of seniors who will need health care services is still projected to increase dramatically in the next 10 years. However, according to Sandy Bell, CEO of Doctor’s Choice Home Care, the number of caregivers, clinicians and facilities to care for those seniors are all decreasing.

“Ten thousand people are turning 65 every day in the U.S., and that [makes] a total of 72 million by 2029,” Bell says. “In Florida over the past five years, we’ve seen senior growth rate as high as 30 percent, from 3.9 million seniors to a little over 5 million today. The Gulf Coast region is about 30 percent of that growth rate.

I don’t see them building hospitals anymore. I predict (that) in 20 years, we won’t have hospitals as we think of them today. All the care delivery will all be done in the home.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for more caregivers, Bell said the emotional and physical toll of the job is increasing every day. In fact, the coronavirus may actually accelerate the ongoing nursing shortage.

“When I talk about caregiver burnout right now, it’s more just working the long, tedious hours and then going home and taking the worry home of ‘Am I potentially at risk for bringing this into my home with my family?’” Bell says, calling the nursing shortage “a nationwide crisis.”

“I think that is going to be one of our major challenges when you talk about 2020 and beyond; where are those clinicians going to come from?”

Copyright 2024 Gulfshore Life Media, LLC All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written consent.

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