All’s Well That Ages Well

Last week my paper “The Economic Value of Targeting Aging” was published in Nature Aging (it’s a joint paper with Martin Ellison and David Sinclair. The paper seeks to place an economic value on the gains to various improvements in health and life expectancy and better understand the relative value of treatments that target aging itself. It also tries to understand the underlying dynamics behind these economic gains and how they are likely to change in the future.?

As the above chart shows improvements in life expectancy mean that the majority of children born in the US today can expect to live into their mid-80s. However, because of this there has been a shift in the disease burden towards non-chronic diseases and an increase in the number of years lost to disease.

These trends have created growing interest in how we respond to these increases in the length of life. My own work is focused around the issues of how we seize these benefits at a macroeconomic level to achieve a #longevity dividend. I have also written in my books #The100YearLife about the changes it implies in our behaviours across the life course. Its also led to growing interest in understanding the biology of aging and the potential development of treatments that target aging itself – either delaying aging or even possibly reversing it.

These developments raise a number of important questions that we try and address in the paper. What is the value of further life expectancy gains? Is a compression of morbidity more valuable? What is the value of treatments that delay aging? How does that compare with treating single diseases?

There are a lot of results in the paper but here are some of the punchlines

• An extra year of life is worth $118k assuming unchanged health. An extra year of healthy life is worth $242k. Gains to life expectancy are diminishing due to declining health. Gains to healthy life expectancy also diminishing but are much more valuable
• Based on current US data, it is more valuable to achieve a full compression of morbidity than further increases in life expectancy
• Delaying ageing is more valuable still and diminishes more slowly due to complementarities in health and life expectancy
• Based on a simulation with metformin we estimate the value of targeting aging to be larger than eradicating major single diseases such as cancer etc
• The aggregate gains from delaying aging are enormous. Doing so and raising life expectancy by one year is worth $38trn for the US, a 10 year increase $367trn #longevitydividend
• At an aggregate level there is a virtuous circle in ageing– the better we age the more valuable further improvements become
• Because children born in high income countries today can expect to live long lives there is a new valuable health imperative – ageing well
• A virtuous circle around aging will see ever more resources attracted to delaying aging. #AllsWellThatAgesWell

?Link to full Nature Aging paper.