Aging: the medical issue the whole world shares
HCEMM / Hungarian Centre of Excellence for Molecular Medicine
HCEMM is a gamechanger organization which catalyzes reforming changes in the research culture, in partnership with EMBL.
The Crisis We Won’t Have
Only a couple of decades ago, the threat of overpopulation seemed to loom large. The number of humans on Earth, had, after all, risen in a seemingly exponential pattern, with booster rockets kicking in during the early modern era. It took all of human history up to 1805 to reach a global population of 1 billion. It took 120 more years to reach 2 billion, and 35 to reach 3. For a while, it really did seem like we were going to multiply beyond the capacity of the environment to support us.
Such fears, however, turned out to be exaggerated. Fertility rate (that is, the number of children a woman will have over the course of her life) has been gradually decreasing since ancient history from around 8 to 10 during the late stone age to around 5 by the 1950’s. Then, after the 50’s, it took a dive, halving by the turn of the millennium. The reasons are manifold, but generally speaking, the longer people live, and the higher their standards of living are, the fewer children they have.
A fertility rate of 2.1 - essentially, parents replacing themselves - is needed to maintain a population, anything less means a slow decrease. Today, fertility rate is 2.3 globally, and 1.5 in Europe. Both? numbers are bound to further decrease in the future.
Peak Human
So, it looks like we aren’t bound for a malthusian overpopulation catastrophe, but a different kind of problem: a population which is gradually growing older, especially in more developed regions, such as Europe. By 2090, global population growth will grind to a halt at about 10 billion people. Over the course of the century, the percentage of elderly people will rise further, with fewer and fewer people of working age to support them.?
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It’s not just births and deaths either: people live longer than before. As a result, they also spend more years struggling with a disease, requiring care, than before.
Their health problems are going to be of central importance in every society. If we are to avoid the brunt of the difficulties arising from an aging population, we will have to better understand how aging relates to disease, and to find better ways of diagnosing and treating age-related disease. In essence, we must strive to increase healthspan - the part of life people spend in generally good health.
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