Brain Health and The way we age now

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The New Yorker April 30th issue includes a superb arti­cle on The Way We Age Now: Can med­i­cine serve an aging pop­u­la­tion?. Atul Gawande pro­vides a great (and a bit depress­ing) sur­vey on the geri­atrics field: more and more need for prac­ti­tion­ers, with less and less supply.

now, a cou­ple of quotes and data points that are very rel­e­vant to our efforts around healthy brain aging.

  • “for most of our hun­dred-thou­sand-year existence—all but the past cou­ple of hun­dred years—the aver­age life span of human beings has been thir­ty years or less. (Research sug­gests that sub­jects of the Roman Empire had an aver­age life expectan­cy of twen­ty-eight years.)”
  • “Inher­i­tance has sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle influ­ence on longevi­ty. James Vau­pel, of the Max Planck Insti­tute for Demo­graph­ic Research, in Ros­tock, Ger­many, notes that only six per cent of how long you’ll live, com­pared with the aver­age, is explained by your parents’ longevi­ty; by con­trast, up to nine­ty per cent of how tall you are, com­pared with the aver­age, is explained by your parents’ height. Even genet­i­cal­ly iden­ti­cal twins vary wide­ly in life span: the typ­i­cal gap is more than fif­teen years.”

Fas­ci­nat­ing. First, let’s appre­ci­ate our incred­i­ble life expectan­cy today; we are lit­er­al­ly push­ing the envel­op of how to main­tain healthy brains and bod­ies. By his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, many of us are liv­ing on “bor­rowed” time. Sec­ond, there you have some evi­dence for the impor­tance of our expe­ri­ence and our lifestyle on how long we live. In terms of healthy aging, on aver­age, nur­ture seems to be at least as impor­tant as nature, and the one more in our con­trol to take action today.

You can learn more on the Suc­cess­ful Aging of the Healthy Brain: a beau­ti­ful essay by Mar­i­an Dia­mond on how to keep our brains and minds active and fit through­out our lives.

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  2. Alvaro says

    Dear Prof. Gavrilov: we feel hon­ored that you dropped by and post­ed a note. Thanks for the very nice arti­cle, and your over­all work!