Life expectancy, lifespan and health span.
What’s the difference between them? That’s the subject of todays video.
I decided to make this video, because there seems to be some confusion out there about what these different terms mean
and how they relate to aging.
I’m constantly hearing guys confuse life expectancy with life span,
and then there’s a lot of guys who don’t even know what a health span is.
So, today I’m going to clear up the confusion and explain what all these terms mean, and a few others,
in excruciating and boring detail.
So, let’s start with lifespan.
Lifespan is simply the maximum age that anyone has achieved in known human history.
And that’s from a scientific point-of-view.
So we’re not talking about mythology, or people in the bible or stories that someone has heard about some really old dude.
We’re talking about people whose lives have been documented.
And right now, the person who has lived longer than any known human is Jeanne Calment.
She lived to a ripe old age of 122 years, 164 days.
She lived in France and she passed away on August 4, 1997
and she said that God must have forgotten about her.
Now, there is some controversy surrounding Jeanne,
and there are people who doubt that Jeanna was actually Jeanne,
and think that she might actually have been her own daughter.
But I think that’s it’s highly likely that was who she said she was and that she lived to 122.
The oldest man was Jiroemon Kimura,
and he lived in Japan. He lived to 116 years, 54 days, and he passed away on June 12, 2013.
Now, this isn’t necessarily how long that it’s possible for humans to live.
It’s just how long humans have actually lived, that we know of.
It’s entirely possible that humans can live for longer that this, possibly even much longer.
Take Jeanne for example. She didn’t really live a longevity lifestyle.
For one thing, as I understand it, she was a life-longer smoker.
If she had lived a longevity lifestyle, I’m thinking that she might possible have lived a lot longer.
Now, let’s compare the human lifespan with life expectancy.
Life expectancy is how long it’s expected that humans will actually live…on average.
And that’s important. Every child that dies in infancy brings down the average.
That’s why people in ancient times only had a life expectancy of around 30 years.
It wasn’t because they were old by the time that they were 30, which seems to be the general belief.
It’s because so many children died in infancy in ancient times.
Added to the rate at which people died by violent means.
People we just as capable of living as long as modern humans, it’s just that most didn’t.
And life expectancy can vary depending on where you live.
There’s the global life expectancy, which is around 72 years.
There’s the life expectancy in the United States, which is around 78 and a half.
There’s the life expectancy for men versus women.
Women, on average, live about 6 to 8 years longer than men.
So, your life expectancy depends on a lot of things, like your gender, where you live, your race, and your socioeconomic status.
Now, let’s talk about health span.
Your health span is the number of years that you’re healthy, active and free from disease.
And it can be considerably shorter than your life expectancy.
But to really explore the concept of health span, we need to introduce another term…morbidity.
Think of it this way.
Your life can be divided into 3 sections; your health span, the onset of morbidity,
and your death, which for a lot of us can drag on for months or even years..
Onset of morbidity is when you start getting chronic diseases.
When you change from being healthy to being sick. And morbidity ends with death.
Right now, in the United States, the onset of morbidity happens around the age of 63.
That’s on average. But there’s a lot of people for whom it happens a lot sooner.
It can start as soon as the early to mid 50’s. Or as late as, well, I guess the sky’s the limit.
There are cases of people over 100 years of age that are still free from chronic disease.
So, when you’re talking about longevity and extending the human lifespan, there’s a few different models.
The first is where you simply get better at managing diseases and just extend the period of morbidity.
This means that the onset of morbidity still happens at the same time, it’s just takes longer to result in death.
A longer period in which people are frail and subject to chronic disease.
To my mind, this is not a particularly attractive model,
yet this seems to be the current way that our healthcare system works.
The second model is where you delay the onset of morbidity.
The period of morbidity is just as long, but it starts later.
You remain in good health for a longer period of time.
But once morbidity sets in, it last about the regular amount of time.
Then there’s compressing morbidity.
This is where you’re healthy for longer and sick for less time.
Where you both extend your health span and then compress the period at the end of your life where you’re experience morbidity.
And with this model, you start to get people who can live a radically longer and healthier life,
people whose health span is longer than other people’s lifespan.
And finally, there’s true life extension, and it utilizes rejuvenation biotechnology.
This is where you utilize the third model of extending the health span and compressing morbidity,
but you then add in a third element.
Late in life, when someone has just started to enter morbidity,
when their accumulated cellular damage starts showing up as perceivable aging,
they undergo rejuvenation.
Now, I believe this will be a combination of a variety of interventions.
They’ll reset their epigenetic clocks to a more youthful state.
They’ll clear out cellular senescence, they’ll fix breaks in the genetic code,
they’re repair the proteostasis network, they’ll restock their supply of stem cells,
and they’ll come out of rejuvenation as a much younger version of themselves.
At that point, they’ll continue the normal aging process until they once again start to enter morbidity…
and they’ll undergo rejuvenation once again.
And they’ll do this again, and again, and again.
And with this model, I think that we’ll start seeing people extend the possible human lifespan out to numbers that are currently unimaginable.
So, do you think this will happen, and if so, how far away is it?
When do you think true rejuvenation biotechnology will finally become available to the common man,
or woman?
Leave me a comment and let me know.
I’m really curious what you guys think.
I hope that you found this video about lifespan, life expectancy,
health span, morbidity and life extension informative.
If you’re new you might want to watch this introductory playlist.
If you’ve looking for more advanced content, try this playlist on the Hallmarks of Aging.
That’s it for me, I’m outta here.
Catch ya next week.