Will you live longer than your grandparents? Maybe not
This is a preview of Never Say Die, a long-form story published today by MATTER. You can read the whole piece for just 99c at the MATTER website.
I always expected to live longer than my grandparents. My paternal grandfather died at 49 after a painful battle with colon cancer. He left behind eight young children and a widow, my grandmother. She died at age 94, when her heart gave out, after two years in a nursing home. My maternal grandparents are still alive, both now in their mid-eighties. He has had melanoma several times and currently has prostate cancer; she is suffering from brain degeneration.
Still, I was taught that I should outlast them, just like they’d outlasted their own parents and grandparents.
This was for good reason: life expectancy soared in the United States over the last 50 years, thanks to better health care and expanded use of vaccines. Medicine today provides my generation with a carefully curated set of healthy-living guidelines: if we don’t smoke, and if we run two miles a day, eat more vegetables and less meat, get regular health screenings and drink a glass of red wine every night, we’ll have a real shot at dancing at the weddings of our great-grandchildren.
But that assumption turns out to be wrong.
In America, life-expectancy increases have been slowing, according to a recent review of mortality data. In fact, some argue that life expectancy may have already hit its upper limit. The same review found that the amount of time that we spend sick with major diseases has actually increased, and age-related diseases are more, not less, prevalent than they used to be. “We have always assumed that each generation will be healthier and longer lived than the prior one,” concluded the study’s authors.
The truth is, I’m likely to die around age 81, the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States. What I eat and do will help get me there, hopefully without suffering from cancer or heart disease, but not much further than that. It turns out that reaching your 100th birthday doesn’t have much to do with lifestyle. It has to do with something over which we have no control — our genes.
According to a new thread that’s emerging among ageing experts, exceptional longevity isn’t a reward for healthy living; it’s more like a winning lottery ticket, coded into the genes of a lucky few — only 1.73 of every 10,000 people in the U.S. have it. The remarkable longevity of centenarians, in other words, is a fluke, the consequence of rare and unique gene combinations passed from parents to children to grandchildren.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that some researchers have recently identified something else, something totally unexpected, in the cells of these oldest living humans, and it could radically transform old age for the rest of us.
To find out what they’ve discovered — and how it could change our lives — visit MATTER to read the rest of Never Say Die. It’s just 99c to get the remaining 6,000 words, on the web and in ebook form.
