Tag Archives: living to 120

Post #7 – Can biomarkers help in the quest for vitality and longevity?

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Vigor, Vitality

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How do we die and how do we lose vitality questions so far have focused my attention on the hurdles to overcome. Some of these have to do with challenges that shorten or bring end to our lifespan. Other items are “diseases” that can decrease our vitality and vigor.

All of these items are, of course, important. For the moment, however, let me step away from these hurdles and reframe the questions.

Let us say, I don’t really have any disease, but I want to live a lifestyle to achieve the optimal health and lifespan. How can I objectively assess where I am presently and then either maintain or improve from here? In other words, how to pursue living an optimal health and vitality, not merely trying to be disease free?

Study of Biomarkers has been an area of aggressive research and pursuit in vitality and aging since the 1980’s.

Biomarkers (short for biological markers) are biological measures of a biological state. By definition, a biomarker is a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention.

In the context of aging, an important focus for biomarkers has been on finding “the clock” that potentially ticks away our lifespan. Discovery of telomere as a potentially genetic clock is one example of a biomarker that won Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco a Nobel Prize. More recently, Steve Horvath of UCLA has introduced another important biomarker to measure human aging through epigenetic signatures.

Both of these works have sparked fascinating research into areas of aging and extending lifespans. I would like to explore these topics in future blog posts.

On the other hand, for vitality, William Evans, PhD, and Irwin H. Rosenberg, MD, professors of nutrition and medicine, respectively, at Tufts University introduced a concept of biomarkers back in 1991 through their book Biomarkers (Simon and Schuster, 1991), updated in their book, BIOMARKERS: The 10 Keys to Prolonged Vitality (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and more recently updated in the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter.

In these publications, Evans and Rosenberg isolated the following signposts of vitality that can be altered for the better by changes in lifestyle:

  1. Muscle Mass
  2. Strength
  3. Basal Metabolic Rate
  4. Body Fat Percentage
  5. Aerobic Capacity
  6. Blood-sugar Tolerance
  7. Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
  8. Blood Pressure
  9. Bone density
  10. Ability to regulate Internal Temperature

These same 10 biomarkers keep showing up everywhere in preventative care, in strength training, in other training programs, in nutrition/diet plans and so on.

Additionally, other important biomarkers I have seen show up in various medical and scientific literature and studies on health, vitality and longevity are:

  1. Stress
  2. Inflammation
  3. Sleep
  4. Body’s pH
  5. Flexibility
  6. Balance
  7. Musculoskeletal alignment
  8. Physical and mental reaction time

So, the way I see it is this: the goal of achieving optimal health and lifespan should focus on developing lifestyle that optimizes these objectively measureable / observable biomarkers.

Any exercise plan, nutrition plan, lifestyle adaptations, and any medical program for achieving optimal vitality and lifespan thus must be measured against these criteria.

What do you think?

Do you know of other biomarkers that we can impact that are important for attaining optimal vitality and lifespan?

Post #5 – Why do I want to live to 120?

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Uncategorized

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As I start this conversation of purposely living to 120, I usually get a wide variety of reaction from people. Frankly, the one that took me by surprise the first time I heard, and, to some extent, still does is, “Why would you want to live to 120 even if you could?”

Now, I have to admit, before I started to get into such conversations, I just naively assumed that most people wanted to live as long as possible. After all, just look at the heroic efforts doctors, hospitals and patients put up to extend life just by few years, months and often even days.

When I was discussing this topic with my father-in-law recently, he remarked, “I will be happy to die at 90.” Then he quickly calculated and figured out that that was only 13 years away. So, he immediately added, “Wait a minute. That seems too soon. Scratch that thought. Let us make it 95.”

My mother-in-law on the other hand queried, “I’m wondering if anyone has interviewed those very old people to determine if they would have chosen to live to 120 or more, had there been a choice. Also curious to know why you would make that choice [of living to 120], since the possibility of your peers and loved ones not being with you seems to be very real. Or do you anticipate the “community” being a replacement for others?”

According to a detailed survey Pew Research Center conducted last year, comments of my in-laws are well represented in the mainstream of views across the US. As the following figures show, only 38% of people in the US would want to live to 120 and most Americans expect to live to between 85 to 90 years.

Figure 5-1

Figure 5-2

Only about 4% feel that ideal lifespan is between 100 and 120 and another 4% think it is over 120.

Figure 5-3

A majority of people think that living to 120 will be a bad thing for society.

Figure 5-4

A surprising result survey researchers noted is that most of these measures are fairly constant across various religions, gender, education or political party affiliations in America.

In my conversations, I have found that three reasons come up most often when people mull over if they personally want to live to 120:

  1. What would be the condition of their personal health? Will it be joyful living or a painful living?
  2. Will they have financial means to sustain themselves? Being broke is not much fun.
  3. Will their peers and loved ones be around? If not, will it be worth living?

As for myself personally, I feel that there are two major objectives of life: Growth and Contribution.

Thus my rationale for wanting to live to 120 is to simply maximize the time I have available to grow and contribute. Additionally, purposely living to 120, learning some things along the way, sharing with others as I learn, seem to fit in with my personal growth and contribution model of life.

In this sort of context, I see the three common objections cited above, as challenges to overcome as I pursue the goal of purposely living to 120. Moreover, not only I want to live to 120, but I wish to do it healthfully, purposefully and joyfully.

Looking at it another way, I feel, if it is okay to expect to get to 90 healthfully, purposefully and joyfully, why not to 120?

And, of course, as my mother-in-laws suspected, a key purpose for me to write this blog and engage in conversations with family, friends, loved ones is to motivate them and along the way find others who would want to share this journey together.

How do you feel about living to 120?

What do you think it would take to live to 120 healthfully, purposefully, and joyfully?

Please leave comments to this post. I and others following this blog would love to hear your perspective!

Post #4 – Is it even possible to live to 120? – Part II

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120

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In the last post on this topic, I concluded that

“As an optimist, when I look at this data, it looks very encouraging to me. First, it is definitely viable to live to 120. It has already been done! Like the four-minute mile, someone has already shown the way.

Second, an increasing number of people are approaching that age with an increasing rate. So, at this rate, I expect by the time my time arrives, dying at 120 will be as routine as dying at 100 today! It might not be very common, but it might not be that rare.”

While I make this informal and what seems like a rather obvious deduction from the data, some folks disagree.

James F. Fries and Lawrence M. Crapo in their book on Vitality and Aging make a compelling argument: while life expectancy has been increasing over the last many decades life-span has been fixed (for all practical purposes – increasing only by 0.1 year per century).

So, intuitively, the chart below may be how one would be tempted to guess the shape of life expectancy curves.

Figure 1
However, they argue, that it is the chart below that corresponds to the reality.

Figure 2

Thus according to their conclusion, while on an average humans are living longer and longer, we are still stuck at dying by the age of 100.

Presenting the data from another perspective in the chart below, as we graph number of deaths against age of death, we observe a normal or Gaussian distribution around certain age at which number of deaths peak. As the life expectancy keeps increasing the curve would look like the IDEAL curve below.

Figure 3

And, as that happens, graph of percent survial rate against age will become “rectanguar” as shown below.

Figure 4

This implies that as we conquer chronic diseases, we will live a healthy long life after which we will succumb very quickly to the forces of nature, within the bounds of a very few years. And, that will define an ideal “natural” death. As we hit certain time limit, all of the cells in the body may burst together like soap bubbles.

Fries and Crapo wrote their book in 1981. So I thought, with all the new research in the last 30+ years, maybe they have changed their mind.

In a more recent review article in the Journal of Aging Research, Compression of Morbidity 1980–2011: A Focused Review of Paradigms and Progress, James F. Fries, Bonnie Bruce, and Eliza Chakravarty reassert the same conclusion and buttress it with more recent studies.

I really like most everything else they assert, derive or conclude in that book- which I would like to talk about in a different post. However, I am personally not sold on this idea of fixed life-span.

It makes me quite uncomfortable. Yeah, you guessed it. After all, my goal is to purposely live to 120!

What do you think?

Have you seen any data, studies or analysis that contradicts this theory about fixed life-span?

Post #3 – Is it even possible to live to 120?

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120

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When I bring it up to friends and family members that I am planning to live to 120 years, the kinds of questions and/or comments I get are:

“Wow, that is pretty gutsy to think that you can live to 120.”

“Why do you want to live that long?”

“I would probably not be around past 85.”

“I would not want to be around that long. It would be no fun. All
my contemporaries would all be gone.”

“My money won’t last that long.”

“What is the longest any one has lived?”

“How many people have lived over 100, 110, or 115?”

As I started wondering about these, I thought maybe I would start from the bottom of the list. Those questions certainly look easier.

So, what is the recent record of longevity for humans?

Wikipedia has some real good pages summarizing this information, for example, you can start with Oldest People and  Super Centenarian.

1500 supercentenarians (those over 110) have been documented in history. There are 30 verified over 115 year olds.

The oldest ever lived was Jeanne Calment from France who died on 4 August 1997 at the age of 122 years, 164 days. Sarah Knauss from the United States came closest to 120; she died on 30 December 1999 at the age of 119 years and 97 days. Two died at 117 years, and five at 116 years.

The oldest currently living is Misao Okawa in Japan at the age of 116 years and 11 days. She is the 10th oldest so far.

In 2012, the UN estimated there to be 316,600 centenarians (over 100) living worldwide. The US has the highest number (53,364 per the 2010 Centenarian Special Report ). Per the report:

“In the period from 1980 to 2010, the centenarian population experienced a larger percentage increase than did the total population. The number of centenarians increased from 32,194 to 53,364, resulting in a 65.8% increase, while the total population increased 36.3 percent. Consequently, the centenarian population increased from 1.42 per 10,000 in 1980 to 1.73 per 10,000 in 2010.”

As an optimist, when I look at this data, it looks very encouraging to me. First, it is definitely viable to live to 120. It has already been done! Like the four-minute mile, someone has already shown the way.

Second, an increasing number of people are approaching that age with an increasing rate. So, at this rate, by the time my time arrives, dying at 120 will be as routine as dying at 100 today! It might not be very common, but it might not be that rare.

What do you think? How do you see these statistics?