#411 How to Add Healthy Years to Your Life - Siim Land Biohacker Summit Amsterdam 2023

Siim Land (0:09)

So, longevity is a very popular topic, one of my favorite topics as well. But as I'm going to unravel in my speech, there's a few shortcomings in the way we think about longevity. And the purpose of my speech is to help you to identify this flaw and overcome it. But I'm going to start with one of the biggest miracles of modern medicine, which is the gradual increase in average human life expectancy over the past few centuries. As you can see from this graph, back in the 18th century, the average human life expectancy was around 40 years of age, whereas nowadays it's above 70 Of course, in the past, this number was brought down severely by the high rate of infant mortality and various infectious diseases. But you can still see that over the past few decades, even the average life expectancy has increased, and we are generally living longer across the entire world, no matter where you're living from. There's just some differences between different regions.

The issue is that it's been identified that there's a massive gap between our current life expectancy and our current maximum human lifespan and the health-adjusted life expectancy. So this particular study, or back in 2020, the global average life expectancy was 73.2 years. But what has been found is that the health-adjusted life expectancy, which refers to the length of your life disease, or disease-free, was only 64 years. So there's a 9.2 year gap between your health span and your lifespan, which is actually around 12% of your maximum lifespan. So 12% of your life people generally spend in some sort of a disease state, whether that be diabetes, high blood pressure, disabilities, other kinds of chronic morbidities. So as you can see, there's a huge gap of improvement. And this is what I call The Longevity Leap, taking a leap to bridge the gap between health span and lifespan, so that we could stay healthier for longer, and we would live longer without diseases. And it is also possible that by doing this, by shortening the gap between your health span and lifespan, by avoiding the chronic diseases, you will also see an increase in the average lifespan at least a few years.

So step number one to achieve this is to delay chronic diseases. What are the top 10 causes of death and causes of morbidity worldwide? They are these non-communicable diseases, modern diseases, as they're also called, such as ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Alzheimer's and diabetes, kidney disease. Those are very modern diseases or they're very common in developed countries. Obviously, in developing countries, they have slightly different burden of diseases, mostly related to infectious diseases. But regardless, the goal to extend your healthspan is to make sure that you don't get these kinds of chronic diseases for at least as long as possible. And they find that the age at which you get one of these chronic diseases greatly determines your life expectancy as well. So in this 2023 study, they found that getting diagnosed with a chronic disease such as diabetes at the age of 30 or 40 shortened your life expectancy by up to 10 to 14 years, even 16 years. Whereas if you got diabetes first time, diagnosed with diabetes first time, in your 70s, you only lost three to five years from your life. So as you can see, if you get one of these chronic diseases early in your life, then you're shortening your life expectancy significantly more than getting those same diseases later in your life. Hence the idea of wanting to delay chronic diseases as much as possible.

Centenarians, people who live over a hundred, do this same thing. They delay chronic diseases. And it's not that centenarians don't get heart disease, that they don't get diabetes or Alzheimer's. They just get those diseases 10 to 20 years later than the average person does. And research has found three main morbidity profiles of centenarians. Survivors are the kind of people who get a particular chronic disease before the age of 80, and they still survive until the age of 100 Delayers are the type of people who delay these chronic diseases until the age of 80, and then they still live to 100 And then there's escapers who don't get any of these chronic diseases up until the age of 100 And 87% of centenarian men and 83% of centenarian women belong to either the delayer or the escapist group. So there is some survivors among centenarians, some centenarians who have these chronic diseases for decades, but they're a small minority. So there's a huge importance in making sure that you don't pretty much get diagnosed with these chronic diseases early in life, and you want to delay them as much as possible and potentially even escape them. That's the optimal scenario.