Besides the healthcare burden, the Silver Tsunami impacts the economy in a big way: Darshit Patel, Decode Age

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld , spoke to?Darshit Patel, Founder, Chief Scientific Officer, Decode Age, to figure out the challenges associated with the surge in the ageing population and the way forward.

Ageing: Global trends

When we talk about ageing for an individual, it is completely subjective. The real problem comes when we talk about the ageing population. If you see, a lot of developed countries are facing this crisis quite imminently, for example, Japan. Japan has a very large aged population currently, and they are facing the difficulties that come with it, like healthcare burdens or the economic crisis. Similarly, the United States is preparing for it, having learned from Japan's example. You can also find countries like the U.K having a Longevity Advisory Committee within their government because they also see ageing as an imminent problem for their demographics. You can see Israel, you can see in Asia also. There is Singapore, there is Hong Kong, and there is South Korea that are actively taking steps to manage their ageing population and they have programmes for elderly care as well. Why are they looking forward to this? Because they see that in the next 15 to 20 years when the entire population will age and a higher percentage of the population will be unable to work, the burden will fall on the younger population. This is the reason why these countries are completely dedicated to solving this problem in their respective geographies.

Geriatric care: Challenges in India

Now extrapolating to what we have seen in the global world and comparing it to India we see some very important trends. The first is that Indian lifespan is constantly increasing. If we see from 1960’s to 2020 we have come from average lifespan of 40 to average lifespan of 69. At the same time our fertility rates have gone from 6 children per fertile woman to less than 2 children per fertile woman today. When you put both graphs together, what do you see? You will see that in the near future India’s median which is 28 right now is going to increase to 42 by the year 2040. When this happens a country has more and more people who are facing with chronic diseases. The healthcare burden is evidently going to increase.

The second problem that comes with it is the compulsory retirement age we have in India. Imagine if the average age of an Indian is 42 and if above 58 most of the people are retired that means most of the people are depending on the younger population.

In demography, this is referred to as the dependency ratio, and it is expected to rise in India. All this combined is going to create a scenario where there will be both healthcare and economic problems, along with social and welfare problems. We should have started preparing for it already, but we haven't because we can see specific doctors who care for older generations in a country like Gerontologists, even research that helps the elderly like Bio Gerontologists, and then there's Ace Technology, where they develop gadgets, applications, and digital technologies that can help the elderly. In all three sectors, we are definitely falling behind. While we're on the subject, there's one very important aspect that we're overlooking: longevity studies. The art and science of keeping people more vital and healthy is needed over time so that they can contribute in whatever capacity they can. If we don’t focus on it today, then we are definitely going to see what other countries have already seen. I think it’s the time to learn rather than just watch.

Chronic disease burden

Our average lifespan is increasing in India, at the same time, there is an important chronic disease incident rate which is also increasing. That is worrisome because today in India, the average age to get hypertension is around 28 years old, the average age to get diabetes is around 36 years old, and the average age to get any cardiac disease that may stay with you for life is around 40 to 42. When both of these diseases strike at such young ages, the health, or health span, will decline, and no one will talk about lifespan because there will be no health left in the life.

Silver Tsunami

Since we are already talking about the ageing population and the geriatric problems in India, let me address or let me coin a very important metaphor that has been recently used to describe this situation, which is the Silver Tsunami. It may sound foreboding, but it is simply a large number of older people dominating a country's population, bringing the unavoidable and worst demographic scenario, which includes chronic diseases, a high healthcare burden, and economic stress. All these three terms, together with an ageing population, constitute what a Silver Tsunami is. It's just a large influx of elderly people into the country, taking their share and becoming dependent.

Decode Age: Journey

The story of Decode Age starts a bit back in 2018 when I was in Edinburgh, and I listened to this one lecture by Noble Prize winner Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. The lecture was on telomeres for which she won the Noble Prize itself, and telomeres caught my interest in longevity. These little thread-like structures at the end of DNA decide how long your cell is going to live and how long and healthy it is going to live.

Well, if it can happen at a cellular level, I thought it could happen at the organism level as well. When I got deeper and deeper into longevity, I understood that there is life beyond telomeres; there is mitochondrial disfunction, genomic instability, and epigenetics. All of these are involved. People are doing what they can to prevent chronic diseases and ageing itself. Would you believe it when I say that most scientists today consider ageing a disease? When you start considering something as a disease, you start curing it or preventing it, and that’s what the world is doing. That’s what India needed. So, when I came back during the pandemic, it was difficult for an Indian to grasp, but it is our job to make them understand because this is going to be one of the most beneficial steps they will take in their lives.

Our products are based on bio-enzymes. Just imagine you have something in your body which your body produces for the first 20–25 years, but now it cannot and that is why you are feeling the effects of after age. If we just restore them in your body, you will start feeling like you were feeling in the first 25 years of your life, and that is what the clinical trials have said as well.

Decode Age: Future plans

While the current products that we offer are purely meant to prevent the ageing process or rather slow it down, the next steps will be to integrate more and more P’s. That is, the first P was preventive, and the second P will be predictive. For a healthy life span and healthy longevity or healthy ageing, it’s not just about preventing, it’s first about predicting what’s happening in your body, how those diseases are developing, what is going wrong at the cellular level. For that, you need a predictive test.

Our first one, which is the Gut Micro Bio, will be based on purely all the organisms living inside your gut. While we achieve that with the prediction, we need the third P from your side, and that is participation. Individuals must understand what they are doing to their biology in everyday situations rather than simply reading and handing out prescriptions to pharmacies that they cannot read. So the third P, Participation, is where we need you, and when all three P's come together, we get to the final P, Personalization. That is the preventive, predictive, and participatory phase, which culminates in personalization, in which we curate plans for you based on your biological goals and how healthy and long you want to live in your life.