Living Longer Lives

Living longer lives........living healthier lives

Healthy Returns – How to Live Longer

By Mary Pinkowish

Barrons : June 23, 2008

Special Report: Retirement -- Eight things to do to live longer and minimize the aches and pains of aging.

My grandmother and great aunt were both pushing 102 when they died. I figure I stand a decent chance of getting there, too -- and when I do, I'll try not to gloat. As Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study, told me, living to 102 simply "won't be as great an accomplishment for you." That is, compared with my aunts I've lived a privileged life health-wise. In addition to my presumably good longevity genes, I'm enjoying the benefits of childhood vaccinations, anti-smoking campaigns throughout my school years, antibiotics and, of course, Lipitor. So are you.

The longer you live, the longer your life expectancy. At his birth in 1950, a white male had a life expectancy of 66. 3 years. When that man turns 65 in 2015, his life expectancy will have stretched to 77.8 (nearly the same as a baby born in the United States in 2006). And if he makes it to 85, his life expectancy will be 89.4 years. A white woman born in 1950 may do even better and can expect to live to age 80 if she reaches 65 and nearly 90 if she reaches 85.

Numbers like that have left baby boomers hoping to far outdistance their original life expectancies -- and to minimize the chronic diseases of aging. Living to 90 or 95 with an agile mind and only a brief illness before death -- that's the ticket. It can make for either a glorious retirement or a fulfilling professional life after 65, as many are planning

So, you've quit smoking and had a colonoscopy. What's next? Below, you'll find the latest thinking on everything from diagnostic tests to exercise to life-extending chemicals. The story "The Hidden Costs of the Golden Years," meanwhile, shows how to handle the spiraling costs of health care. Here's to a long and financially savvy life.

Get a Coronary Scan

"We can pick up coronary artery disease 20 years before you need bypass surgery or have a heart attack," says David A. Fein, medical director at the Princeton Longevity Center in Princeton, N.J. While cholesterol levels can be telling, a coronary CT scan to determine your calcium score, or how much calcium is in the plaque that lines blood vessels in your heart, is a better predictor of heart disease and stroke risk, says Fein. By a certain age most of us have some plaque, and calcium specks in plaque suggest that a person is at higher risk for a coronary "event" than someone whose plaque contains no calcium.

The predictive value of coronary calcium scoring was demonstrated in a study of more than 6,700 men and women published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March. Compared with people who had the lowest (best) calcium scores, those with the highest scores had 10 times the risk of angina, a heart attack, or death from coronary heart disease. A coronary-calcium scan, runs between $300 and $600; insurance coverage varies. You'll be exposed to X-ray radiation equivalent to the background radiation you'd normally get during the course of a year just walking around.

Exit the Road to Diabetes

Diabetes, which affects more than 20% of people over age 60, is the antithesis of healthy aging and reduces life expectancy by up to 15 years. Diabetes greatly increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, eye and kidney disease, and limb amputations. A study of more than 5,100 people published in an early, online edition of the July 1 Annals of Internal Medicine demonstrated a link between diabetes and hearing loss, with 21% of diabetics experiencing at least mild hearing loss, compared with just 9% of non-diabetics of the same age.

Your doctor can tell if you're at risk by determining whether you have metabolic syndrome -- a cluster of problems including excess abdominal fat, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, insulin resistance or glucose intolerance, a tendency to make blood clots, and high blood levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP. Early medication and lifestyle changes can delay the onset of diabetes, or prevent it.

Find Your Inner Fat

Body fat comes up frequently in health discussions, but not all body fat is created equal. There is subcutaneous fat, which lies just under the skin and is harmful mainly because of the extra pounds it represents, and there is visceral fat, which packs the spaces around abdominal organs and has been linked to increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.

People with lots of visceral fat often have high levels of CRP, which is associated with heart disease. Visceral fat is very strongly associated with metabolic syndrome, according to results from the widely respected Framingham Heart Study that were published last year in the journal Circulation.

It's impossible to tell the difference between visceral fat and subcutaneous fat from looking at a person; even slim people can carry lots of visceral fat. So doctors are increasingly ordering scans. "A single CT image through your abdomen is all I need to find out which type you have," says Fein, whose center is renowned for its comprehensive "executive physicals."

The remedy for visceral fat: a low-carbohydrate diet, an exercise program and possible dietary supplementation.

Parliamo Italiano!

We hear a lot about how aging brains benefit from "brain training" -- learning a new language, or taking up a musical instrument, or playing certain types of video games. But does reality match the hype?

"I'm skeptical about these programs," says Harvard-based geriatric psychiatrist Deborah Blacker. She explains that the evidence that they specifically prevent or delay dementia is flimsy. "Keep active doing something that you like rather than something that someone has marketed to you," says Blacker. By all means learn Italian if you want to converse with the locals on your next trip to the Mediterranean, but don't take up the violin if you don't have a real desire to learn.

Cabaret artist Marilyn Maye is a case in point. She appeared on the Johnny Carson show 76 times, and at age 80 (looking 65), she still maintains a hectic performance schedule. She runs her own business -- from contracts and travel to rehearsals, choreography and lighting. And that may help keep her going. "I live in the details," she says.

E-X-E-R-C-I-S-E

Your internist has battered you with advice to help lower your risk of heart disease, but now Alzheimer's experts are singing the same song. "The measures we take to improve cardiovascular fitness, including the control of blood pressure, cholesterol, body weight, and increased aerobic exercise, also prevent dementia. This is a win-win," says Harvard's Blacker.

"At a minimum, the damage done to your brain by Alzheimer's is additive with the damage done by vascular disease," she explains. "These processes may even be synergistic, with vascular disease worsening the changes caused by Alzheimer's."

"The evidence that cardiovascular fitness reduces the risk of dementia is so strong that I advise people to really push themselves in this area," Blacker says. "Even if you don't like to exercise, the benefits to your brain make the effort well worthwhile."

Mind Your Bones

Since exercise is so vital to continued good health, you've got to ensure that you can continue. Hip and other fractures sideline older people and often mark the beginning of a permanent decline. That's why men -- not just women -- should consider getting tested for osteoporosis. "As many as 40% of our male patients aged 40 and older have low bone density that predisposes to fractures," says Fein. "One third of these have low testosterone levels. We bring that up to a normal level, and we recommend calcium, vitamin D, weight-bearing exercise and weight training, just as we do in women."

Pay attention to your joints, too. "Do flexibility, range of motion and joint-strengthening exercises so you don't end up in a wheelchair or in need of multiple joint replacements," advises Houston-based podiatrist Jeffrey A. Ross. He recommends yoga and Pilates, along with swimming, walking and biking. Runners and walkers, he adds, should have a foot or sports-medicine specialist analyze their gait for biomechanical problems that could lead to hip, knee or ankle damage. Wearing prescription orthotics now could prevent pain and disability later.

Your Choice: Eat or Drink Your Polyphenols

Evidence has been building for 20 years that at least in some animals, extreme caloric deprivation triggers a process that curbs degenerative aging. Most people would find the amount of required caloric restriction (about 30%) too hard to maintain. But scientists have found that a chemical called resveratrol, famously present in red wine, may mimic the effects of caloric restriction.

Earlier this month, Richard Weindruch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute on Aging, and colleagues published a study in the online journal PLoS One showing that resveratrol may delay aging in mice at lower doses than previously thought. "No other nutrients that I'm aware of have the ability to increase maximum life expectancy in mice. It's striking," says Weindruch. The findings, he adds, suggest that resveratrol and other polyphenol compounds "have the ability to oppose multiple aspects of aging." Some good sources of polyphenols: coffee, black tea, apples, wheat bran and cherries.

Lighten Up

What can we learn from the very old? Thomas Perls of the New England Centenarian Study, a Boston University project billed as the largest-ever study of centenarians, says people who live to 100 and beyond know how to keep their cool. "They use a lot of humor in their daily lives and are gregarious," he says. "These characteristics help them develop important social networks, which do two things: They provide a social safety net and keep people mentally stimulated, which is incredibly important."

A study to be published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health supports this, showing that cognitive function is preserved when women have large social networks. "Men may not get quite the same lift, probably because women are better networkers," says lead author Valerie Crooks of Kaiser Permanente, the nonprofit health-care plan. Women make up 85% of centenarians.

Gentlemen, start your networks. And we're talking poker nights and bowling, not corporate computers.

100 Candles on Her Next Cake, and Three R’s to Get Her There :

resolution, resourcefulness and resilience

By Jane E. Brody : NY Times Article : October 18, 2010

Esther Tuttle is nearing the end of the 10th decade of a remarkably productive and adventurous life. If all continues to go as well as it has to date, next July 1 she will join the rapidly growing clan of centenarians, whose numbers in the United States have increased to 96,548 in 2009 from 38,300 in 1990, according to the Census Bureau.

At age 92, Mrs. Tuttle (best known as Faity, her childhood nickname) wrote a memoir with the prescient title “No Rocking Chair for Me” (iUniverse) displaying an acute memory of events, names, dates and places that she retains as she approaches 100.

At 30 years her junior, I couldn’t begin to recall the kinds of details that remain fresh in her still very active mind. I can only hope, should I live that long, to be as vibrant and physically fit as she is.

What, I asked, is the secret to her longevity? Is it genetics? Perhaps, but it’s hard to say. Her parents died at ages 42 and 50, leaving her an orphan at age 11, along with three siblings, one of whom did live to 96.

Genes do play a role in longevity. Dr. Nir Barzilai, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, reports that centenarians are 20 times as likely as the average person to have a long-lived relative. But a Swedish study of identical twins separated at birth and reared apart concluded that only about 20 to 30 percent of longevity is genetically determined. Lifestyle seems to be the more dominant factor.

As Mrs. Tuttle said in clarion tones that belie her advanced age: “I am blessed and I’ve worked on it. You’ve got to work, be cheerful and look for something fun to do. It’s a whole attitude.

“If you respect what the doctors tell you to do, you can live a long life, but you have to do it. You can’t ignore the advice.”

Her memoir and replies to my queries revealed three critical attributes that might be dubbed longevity’s version of the three R’s: resolution, resourcefulness and resilience. Throughout her long life, she’s taken hardships in stride, traipsed blithely over obstacles and converted many into building blocks. And she has adhered to a regimen of a careful diet, hard work, regular exercise and a very long list of community service, all while raising three children.

Like many if not most other centenarians, according to the findings of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, Mrs. Tuttle is an extrovert who has many friends, a healthy dose of self-esteem and strong ties to family and community. She continues to enjoy her youthful passions for the theater and opera.

A study of centenarians in Sardinia found that they tend to be physically active, have extensive social networks and maintain strong ties with family and friends. They are also less likely to be depressed than the average 60-year-old.

Do optimists live longer than pessimists? Yes, studies indicate. Dr. Hilary A. Tindle of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that among 97,000 women followed for eight years, those deemed optimistic were significantly less likely to die from heart disease and all causes than were pessimistic women, whom she described as “cynically hostile.”

The optimists were also less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes or high cholesterol, suggesting they take better care of their health. Indeed, the pessimists were more likely to be overweight, smoke cigarettes and avoid exercise, indicating, Dr. Tindle says, that negative thinkers make poorer lifestyle choices than positive thinkers.

A Walking Example

Faity Tuttle could serve as a model for that study’s findings. Each morning, she does an hour of yoga and other floor exercises, then dresses and goes out on the street or to the top of her Manhattan apartment building for a half-hour walk before breakfast. Her usual breakfast: orange juice, oatmeal, a banana and black coffee. Then she works at her desk, mostly corresponding with her 11 grandchildren, 21 great grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, now 3. “So many birthdays — one or two a month,” she said.

Lunch may be soup or leftover meat, a “very thin” slice of rye toast, with tea and Jell-O or fruit for dessert. The afternoon includes an hour’s nap and another walk, often combined with grocery shopping.

At 6:30 every evening, she enjoys a cocktail before a home-cooked dinner of perhaps lamb, pork chops, roast chicken or “a very good stew” she makes herself. Mrs. Tuttle, whose husband, Ben, died in 1988, lives with a dear friend, Allene Hatch, 84, an artist and author affectionately known as Squeaky, with whom she shares K.P. “Most days I do the cooking, and Squeaky cleans up afterward.”

Stay-at-home evenings are spent reading or watching “a good movie” on television, she said.

Mrs. Tuttle recently gave up a lifelong passion for horseback riding, but she still drives, though not on public roads, only on a 300-acre farm in upstate New York that the Tuttles had the wisdom to acquire when land was cheap. Her children built homes on the property and now live there in retirement, providing Mrs. Tuttle with nearby loving company all summer and during the spring and fall weekends she spends at the farm.

The Benefits of Coping

As good as her health is (no high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes), it is not perfect. She describes herself as “a bionic woman from the waist up,” with an artificial breast to replace the cancerous one removed 20 years ago, a heart pacemaker installed about a decade ago, a hearing aid and contact lenses.

Although she has spurned dairy foods for most of her life (she still follows the advice of a predecessor of Dr. Robert Atkins who told her to avoid dairy and follow a diet low in carbohydrates and rich in meats and fats), she was only recently found to have osteoporosis, for which she now takes a monthly pill along with daily supplements of calcium and vitamins C and D.

Nor has she always enjoyed an affluent lifestyle. Though born into an accomplished, well-to-do family, her parents’ early death (the children were taken in by an aunt with limited means) and her decision to pursue an acting career led to a hardscrabble existence that persisted through the early years of her marriage and life on a farm with three small children and no electricity and makeshift indoor plumbing. According to one study, survivors of traumatic life events learn to cope better with stress and poverty and are more likely to live to 100.

In lieu of trauma, there are many measures one can take to facilitate a long, wholesome and productive life. Why live to 100 if those last years will be marred by physical and emotional misery?

What to Do Now to Feel Better at 100

By Jane E. Brody : NY Times Article : October 25, 2010

Many changes take place in physical abilities as we age. Try as I may, I simply can’t swim as fast at 69 as I did at 39, 49 or even 59. Nor am I as steady on my feet. I can only assume my strength has waned as well — I’m finding bottles and jars harder to open and heavy packages harder to lift and carry.

But in August, I hiked in the Grand Canyon, prompting my 10-year-old grandson Stefan to ask, “Grandma, how many 69-year-olds do you think could do this?”

The answer, of course, is “a lot.” And the reason is that we work at it. For my part, I exercise daily, walking three miles or biking 10, then swimming three-quarters of a mile. In spring and summer, heavy-duty gardening strengthens my entire body.

But now that my physically stronger spouse is gone, I see that I need to make some improvements. With no one handy to open those jars or lift those heavy objects, I’ve begun strength training so I can remain as independent as possible as long as possible.

In a newly published book, “Treat Me, Not My Age”(Viking), Dr. Mark Lachs, director of geriatrics at the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, discusses two major influences (among others) on how well older people are able to function.

Delaying Bodily Decline

The first, called physiologic reserve, refers to excess capacity in organs and biological systems; we’re given this reserve at birth, and it tends to decrease over time. In an interview, Dr. Lachs said that as cells deteriorate or die with advancing age, that excess is lost at different rates in different systems.

The effects can sneak up on a person, he said, because even when most of the excess capacity is gone, we may experience little or no decline in function. A secret of successful aging is to slow down the loss of physiologic reserve.

“You can lose up to 90 percent of the kidney function you had as a child and never experience any symptoms whatsoever related to kidney function failure,” Dr. Lachs said. Likewise, we are born with billions of brain cells we’ll never use, and many if not most of them can be lost or diseased before a person experiences undeniable cognitive deficits.

Muscle strength also declines with age, even in the absence of a muscular disease. Most people (bodybuilders excluded) achieve peak muscle strength between 20 and 30, with variations depending on the muscle group. After that, strength slowly declines, eventually resulting in telling symptoms of muscle weakness, like falling, and difficulty with essential daily tasks, like getting up from a chair or in and out of the tub.

Most otherwise healthy people do not become incapacitated by lost muscle strength until they are 80 or 90. But thanks to advances in medicine and overall living conditions, many more people are reaching those ages, Dr. Lachs writes: “Today millions of people have survived long enough to keep a date with immobility.”

The good news is that the age of immobility can be modified. As life expectancy rises and more people live to celebrate their 100th birthday, postponing the time when physical independence can no longer be maintained is a goal worth striving for.

Gerontologists have shown that the rate of decline “can be tweaked to your advantage by a variety of interventions, and it often doesn’t matter whether you’re 50 or 90 when you start tweaking,” Dr. Lachs said. “You just need to get started. The embers of disability begin smoldering long before you’re handed a walker.”

Lifestyle choices made in midlife can have a major impact on your functional ability late in life, he emphasized. If you begin a daily walking program at age 45, he said, you could delay immobility to 90 and beyond. If you become a couch potato at 45 and remain so, immobility can encroach as early as 60.

“It’s not like we’re prescribing chemotherapy — it’s walking,” Dr. Lachs said. “Even the smallest interventions can produce substantial benefits” and “significantly delay your date with disability.”

“It’s never too late for a course correction,” he said.

In a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004, elderly men and women who began strengthening exercises after a hip fracture increased their walking speed, balance and muscle strength and reduced their risk of falls and repeat fractures.

“Minor interventions that may seem trivial — like lifting small weights with multiple repetitions — can lead to dramatic improvements in quality of life,” Dr. Lachs said.

Supportive Environment

As with your body, your environment can be tweaked to enhance life in the upper decades. You can make adjustments at home to anticipate medical problems you are likely to face as you get older — allowing you to keep your independence, remain in familiar surroundings and minimize the risk of injury.

As Dr. Lachs put it, “It’s not just mold and radon that can make homes sick.” His colleague Rosemary Bakker says that most dwellings and equipment today were designed for 21-year-olds, and she has listed a set of issues that can jeopardize older people’s ability to function safely on their own:

¶Windows or doors that are hard to open.

¶Poor lighting, especially in crucial areas like the bathroom and kitchen.

¶ Rugs, irregular floors and other tripping hazards.

¶Tubs and showers that are hard to use if you have arthritis.

¶Stair widths or heights that are difficult to negotiate if you have neurological troubles.

¶Appliances and utensils that are challenging to handle if you have limited manual dexterity.

¶Poor layout of rooms, like a bathroom far from the bedroom, that can be a problem when you walk slowly.

Ms. Bakker, a certified interior designer with a master’s degree in gerontology, is the author of “AARP Guide to Revitalizing Your Home: Beautiful Living for the Second Half of Life” (Lark, 2010). The book shows how homes can be modified to promote lifelong safety and independence and still remain stylish. Many ideas can be found on her Web site, environmentalgeriatrics.com.

“These things are underpublicized, underappreciated and underutilized,” Dr. Lachs writes. Most fixes are simple and unobtrusive and “many are dirt-cheap,” he said, adding that if money is tight, it is best spent on improvements in the bathroom.

Centenarians Have Plenty of Bad Habits Too

By Anahad O'Connor : NY Times : August 4, 2011

Do you need healthy habits to get you to 100?For those of us relying on healthy habits to get us to age 100, the findings from a new study of centenarians may come as a bit of a blow.

The centenarians in the study indulged in smoking and drinking just as much as their shorter-lived counterparts. They did not appear to follow healthier or more stringent diets than others in the general population. They were also just as likely to be overweight, and may even have exercised less. So what contributed to their unusually long lives?

Scientists have long debated the roles of nature and nurture in longevity. Centenarians are, for example, far more likely than the average person to have long-lived relatives, suggesting that long life may be largely inherited. And yet studies have shown that identical twins separated at birth and reared apart can have vastly different life spans — with one living exceptionally long, and the other dying long before — indicating that genes have only so much influence.

The new findings, part of an ongoing look into longevity by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, focused on Ashkenazi Jews, a group that is more genetically homogenous than other populations, making it easier to identify genetic differences that contribute to life span. In the study, the researchers followed 477 Ashkenazi centenarians who were 95 or older and living independently. They asked them about their habits and the ways they lived when they were younger. Using data collected in the 1970s, the researchers compared the long-lived group with another group of 3,000 people in the general population who were born around the same time but who generally did not make it to age 95.

They found that the people who lived to 95 and beyond did not seem to exhibit healthier lifestyles than those who died younger. Forty-three percent of the male centenarians reported exercising regularly at moderate intensity, compared with 57 percent of men in the other group. About 24 percent of the men in the older group drank alcohol daily, compared with 22 percent in the other group. Among women, they found that the same percentage in both groups reported following low-calorie diets.

Almost 30 percent of the women who lived exceptionally long were smokers, slightly more than the 26 percent of women in the comparison population who smoked. About 60 percent of the older men smoked, and 74 percent of their shorter-lived counterparts did.

Men and women in both groups were also just as likely to be overweight as people in the general population. The one difference in that area was that centenarians were less likely to be obese. Only 4.5 percent of men in the older group were obese, compared with 12 percent of the other male subjects. A similar pattern was found among women.

So did all that hard living just make them happier, contributing to their extended life spans? Much has been made over the years about optimism and other social factors that may contribute to longevity. But in the latest study, only 19 percent of the people who lived past 95 said they believed a “positive attitude” played a role in their longevity, while just 6 percent credited their religious faith or spirituality.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, the lead author of the study and the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Einstein, said that many of the centenarians he has studied over the years do in fact seem to have optimistic or positive outlooks on life. But it’s unclear if a lifetime of positive thinking got them to a healthy old age, or if they developed a positive outlook much later in life as they realized their good fortune.

“It’s very hard for us to answer these questions,” he said. “Is it possible that everyone who was born in 1910 and went through the Depression and many wars is looking at life now and saying, ‘It’s pretty good, I should be happy’?”

Dr. Barzilai said he had interviewed many adult children of centenarians who swear that their parents changed in many ways between 80 and 100.

“The children will say, ‘Yeah, they’re agreeable now, but you should have seen them when they were 60 or 70, they were so obnoxious,’” he said.

One finding that was not surprising in the latest study: About a third of the people 95 or older reported having many long-lived family members. Previous studies of Ashkenazi Jews have helped pinpoint a gene variant in this population that causes significantly elevated levels of HDL, or “good” cholesterol, in centenarians that appears to confer resistance to heart disease and Alzheimer’s. For people who don’t have the gene variant, there is potential good news, Dr. Barzilai said: One drug company is currently developing a drug that has the same effect on HDL.

Other studies have shown very slightly decreased levels of thyroid function in people who live longer, as well as in their siblings and offspring, which has opened the door to another line of genetic research.

“We’re identifying genes that play a role in aging,” Dr. Barzilai said, “and then we can design drugs to mimic their actions.”

Dr. Barzilai said it is clear from research on centenarians that reaching 100 years of age is not just a matter of adopting healthy habits; having the right genes appears to greatly improve the odds. But he is nonetheless very much a supporter of the mantra that diet and exercise are crucial, especially for those without a string of long-lived parents, aunts and uncles.

“If you listen to what your doctor is telling you and you watch your weight, drink a glass of wine a day, exercise, avoid smoking and treat any conditions like high blood pressure,” he said, “you’re still likely to get to be over the age of 80.”

Living to 100 and Beyond

Scientists are on the brink of radically expanding the span of a healthy life. Author Sonia Arrison on the latest advances—and what they mean for human existence.

WSJ : August 27, 2011

In Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," Gulliver encounters a small group of immortals, the struldbrugs. "Those excellent struldbrugs," exclaims Gulliver, "who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!"

But the fate of these immortals wasn't so simple, as Swift goes on to report. They were still subject to aging and disease, so that by 80, they were "opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative," as well as "incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren." At 90, they lost their teeth and hair and couldn't carry on conversations.

In her new book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, Sonia Arrison explains how living 150, 500 and even 1,000 years may be possible thanks to better health and science.

For as long as human beings have searched for the fountain of youth, they have also feared the consequences of extended life. Today we are on the cusp of a revolution that may finally resolve that tension: Advances in medicine and biotechnology will radically increase not just our life spans but also, crucially, our health spans.

The number of people living to advanced old age is already on the rise. There are some 5.7 million Americans age 85 and older, amounting to about 1.8% of the population, according to the Census Bureau. That is projected to rise to 19 million, or 4.34% of the population, by 2050, based on current trends. The percentage of Americans 100 and older is projected to rise from 0.03% today to 0.14% of the population in 2050. That's a total of 601,000 centenarians.

But many scientists think that this is just the beginning; they are working furiously to make it possible for human beings to achieve Methuselah-like life spans. They are studying the aging process itself and experimenting with ways to slow it down by way of diet, drugs and genetic therapy. They are also working on new ways to replace worn-out organs—and even to help the body to rebuild itself. The gerontologist and scientific provocateur Aubrey de Grey claims that the first humans to live for 1,000 years may already have been born.

The idea of "conquering" aging has raised hopes, but it has also spurred a debate about whether people should actually aspire to live that long. What does a longer-living population mean for relationships and families? How can we afford to support massive numbers of aging citizens, and how can individuals afford to support themselves? Won't a society of centenarians just be miserable, tired and cranky?

R. Colman/Science/AAASA 2009 study found that restricting calories seems to slow aging in rhesus monkeys over a 20-year period. Both of the monkeys above are pictured at 27 years old. The one on the left (A, B) ate a regular diet. The more robust-looking monkey on the right (C, D) was fed a restricted diet with 30% fewer calories than usual.

The scientists working on these issues respond to such concerns by stressing that their aim is not just to increase the quantity of life but its quality as well. A life span of 1,000 may be optimistic, they suggest, but an average span of 150 years seems well within reach in the near future, with most of those years being vital and productive.

One key area of research is gene therapy. Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco, found that partially disabling a single gene, called daf-2, doubled the life of tiny worms called Caenorhabditis elegans. Altering the daf-16 gene and other cells added to the effect, allowing the worms to survive in a healthy state six times longer than their normal life span. In human terms, they would be the equivalent of healthy, active 500-year-olds.

Experiments with animals are not always applicable to humans, of course, but humans do have the same sort of genetic pathways that Dr. Kenyon manipulated. Other researchers have made similar findings. A laboratory at the University of Arkansas genetically altered worms to live 10 times longer than normal. Spain's National Cancer Research Center found an altogether different way to extend the lives of mice by 45%.

Other scientists are working to repair and replace worn-out body parts. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, led by Anthony Atala, has successfully grown bladders in a lab and implanted them in children and teenagers suffering from a congenital birth defect. The basic structure of the bladders was built using biodegradable materials and was then populated with stem cells from the patients, so that their bodies wouldn't reject the transplant. It worked. Today the institute is working to grow more than 30 different organs and tissues, including livers, bone and hearts.

With heart disease the No. 1 killer in the U.S., building a human heart will be a major step forward. Doris Taylor announced in 2008 that her cardiovascular lab at the University of Minnesota had managed to grow a rat heart using a technique similar to Dr. Atala's, except that the structure she used was from a donor rat. Dr. Taylor is currently repeating the experiment on pigs, not only because their hearts are closer in size to human hearts but also because pig hearts are already used for replacement parts for some human heart patients.

Extending Life Span in the LabWorms: 900%

Fruit Flies: 100%

Monkeys: 60%*

Mice: 45%

*Study still ongoing, Source: Sonia Arrison

Centenarians in the U.S.1950: 2,300

2010: 79,000

2050: 601,000*

*Based on current trends, Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Another promising new technology is organ printing, which is exactly what it sounds like: Cells, rather than ink, are put into a sophisticated 3-D printer and then printed onto a biodegradable material. The machine prints "pages" of cells on top of each other to make a three-dimensional shape. In December 2010, a company called Organovo announced that it had successfully printed human blood vessels—an important feature of all organs.

At the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, Stephen Badylak is working with "extracellular matrix"—the material that gives structure to tissue—from pig bladders. Dr. Badylak has used ECM to grow back the tips of patients' fingers that have been accidentally snipped off, and his colleagues have used it to cure early-stage esophageal cancer by removing the cancerous cells and replacing them with ECM. Scientists don't yet understand why the substance promotes new tissue growth, and ECM can't yet grow back entire limbs, but the results so far are impressive.

Assuming that the necessary technology eventually arrives, the big question is: What will life look like when we live to over 100?

One of the most important areas of potential change is family and relationships. With an average life expectancy of 150 years, it's possible that we might see age differences of as much as 80 or 90 years between spouses and partners. But the historical evidence suggests that such disparities in age probably won't be common.

Research by Norway's government statistics bureau shows that between 1906 and 2002, life expectancy rose from around 57 years to around 79 years in that country. But the average age difference in relationships remained at around 3.5 years (men being slightly older).

One reason for the rarity of relationships with large age gaps is that modern societies tend to look down on them. Will the number of men marrying much younger women continue to grow as people live longer and such relationships become less stigmatized?

Research done at Stanford, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Wisconsin suggests that older men seek younger partners primarily to continue having children. If that is the case, such men won't need to find younger partners once it is easier for older women to have their own biological children using new fertility technologies.

And in the future, older women (and men) will likely look less "aged" because they will remain healthy for much longer. Remarriage for beauty or youth will lose some of its distinguishing force.

More time to live also raises the possibility of more divorces and remarriages—the seven-year itch turned into the 70-year itch. Today, some people get married two or even three times, but as people live longer, these numbers could increase, perhaps exceeding Liz Taylor proportions for at least a small slice of the population. But greater longevity might also lead to a higher incidence of serial monogamy, regardless of whether it leads to marriage, perhaps interspersed with periods of living alone.

As researchers further refine reproductive technology like egg freezing and ovary transplants, the ranks of older parents, currently on the rise, are bound to increase even more. This raises the prospect of families in which siblings are born many decades apart, perhaps 50 years or more. How would such age gaps between children change family dynamics?

We know that siblings of the same age cohort have more meaningful and longer-lasting relationships than those separated by more years, but it is difficult to predict how the relationship between siblings born decades apart would function. It probably would be akin to that of a child and an aunt or uncle, or even a child and a grandparent.

Living longer would also mean both making and spending money longer. What would an economy look like in which work lives extended into a second century of potential productivity?

Most of us already don't expect to retire at 65. The Social Security system cannot afford it even now, and in the future, going out to pasture at 65 will mean decades of boredom. People who live to 150 will use their additional years for second and third careers, and we are likely to see a greater movement toward part-time and flex-time work.

It has long been clear that wealth creates health. We now know that health also begets wealth. In a paper titled "The Health and Wealth of Nations," Harvard economist David Bloom and Queen's University economist David Canning explain that, based on the available research, if there are "two countries that are identical in all respects, except that one has a five-year advantage in life expectancy," then the "real income per capita in the healthier country will grow 0.3–0.5% per year faster than in its less healthy counterpart."

Although these percentages might look small, they are actually quite significant, especially when we consider that between 1965 and 1990 countries experienced an average per capita income growth of 2% per year.

Those numbers are based on only a five-year longevity advantage. What if a country had a 10-, 20-, or 30-year advantage? The growth might not continue to rise in linear fashion, but if the general rule holds—a jump in life expectancy causes an increase in economic growth per capita—then having a longer-lived population would generate enormous differences in economic prosperity.

In a 2006 study, the University of Chicago economists Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel painstakingly calculated that for Americans, "gains in life expectancy over the century were worth over $1.2 million per person to the current population." They also found that "from 1970 to 2000, gains in life expectancy added about $3.2 trillion per year to national wealth."

The world's advanced societies are finally in a position to launch a true offensive against the seemingly irresistible terms imposed on our lives by disease and death. That's good news for us as individuals and for humanity as a whole. A longer span of healthy years will lead to greater wealth and prospects for happiness.

But realizing the full potential of the longevity revolution will not be easy. We will need to tackle important and legitimate questions about the effects of greater health spans on population growth, resource availability and the environment. The decisions that we make in this regard will matter far more than the mere fact of greater numbers.

The very idea of radically greater longevity has its critics, on the right and the left. Leon Kass, who served as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics under George W. Bush, sees the scientific effort to extend life as an instance of our hubris, an assault on human nature itself.

The environmental writer Bill McKibben, for his part, strongly opposes what he calls "techno-longevity," arguing that "like everything before us, we will rot our way back into the woof and warp of the planet."

I'm unconvinced. Arguments against life extension are often simply an appeal to the status quo. If humans were to live longer, we are told, the world, in some way, would not be right: It would no longer be noble, beautiful or exciting.

But what is noble, beautiful and exciting about deterioration and decline? What is morally suspect about ameliorating human suffering?

The answer is nothing. Everything that we have, socially and as individuals, is based on the richness of life. There can be no more basic obligation than to help ourselves and future generations to enjoy longer, healthier spans on the Earth that we share.

—Adapted from "100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith" by Sonia Arrison. Available from Basic Books. Copyright © 2011.

Centenarians Have Plenty of Bad Habits Too

Anahad O'Connor : NY Times : August 4, 2011