Dr. Michael Ringel, Ph.D., presented developments and important achievements in the field of biology of aging and longevity at the CYPRUS EMEA Healthspan Summit, shedding light on the limits of current health systems and the importance of intervening in the mechanisms of aging.
As he explained, increasing health spending does not automatically lead to a longer healthy life expectancy, while he observed that developed societies seem to have reached a natural limit in terms of how much life expectancy can be increased through traditional medicine alone.
In his statement, he said that traditional medicine focuses on treating individual diseases, but this approach has limited effectiveness when it comes to substantially extending life. Citing scientific data, he stressed that even eliminating serious diseases would only partially limit mortality, without radically changing the overall lifespan.
According to the expert, real change can only come about through intervention in the aging process at the molecular level, based on the so-called gerontoscience hypothesis, according to which aging itself is the basic common mechanism behind most chronic diseases.
As he noted, about 90% of diseases that lead to death are linked to aging, as conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia increase exponentially with age. This means, as he pointed out, that if the biological process of aging itself is shifted, the onset of many different diseases can be delayed simultaneously.
Presenting the scientific data supporting this approach, he referred to genetic interventions that have shown a doubling of lifespan in simple organisms, while improving their overall health, as well as to pharmacological interventions, such as the use of rapamycin in experimental animals, which led to a significant increase in lifespan and delayed onset of diseases.
He also referred to epidemiological data from human populations, pointing out that models of restricted caloric intake are associated not only with longer lifespan but also with lower rates of diseases associated with aging, as is typically recorded in long-lived populations.
The CYPRUS EMEA Healthspan Summit was organised by the St. Moritz Longevity Forum in strategic partnership with the MHV Group.
(Source: InBusinessNews)
