Is a longer life always a better one? 

As science and modern medicine evolve, the human lifespan is getting longer by the year. According to the Global Burden of Disease Study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, global life expectancy will increase by 4.9 years in men and 4.2 years in women between 2022 and 2050. But more years doesn’t necessarily equate to a better quality of life, experts told Seattle magazine. 

“Longer years are not necessarily better years,” says Dr. Gillian Ehrlich, family nurse practitioner and medical director of Neuroveda Health, a Seattle-based clinic focused on Ayurvedic medicine. “Nobody thinks about spending their last 20 years in a hospital on the decline. And I do think that we are declining a lot sooner than we used to.” 

While the idea of living as many years as possible sounds appealing on the surface, a person’s “healthspan,” or the number of years someone can expect to live healthily, doesn’t tend to match the average lifespan, says David Marcinek, PhD, co-director of the University of Washington’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in Basic Biology of Aging. “Lifespan is outstripping healthspan,” says Marcinek. 

“The goal of a lot of aging research now is to really drive that healthspan — it’s not necessarily to make people live longer,” says Marcinek. “The ideal is to have a square mortality curve, not a slow decline.”

Quality of life

Though we’re living longer lives, there has been a shift in the kinds of things that are killing us. Humans are less often suffering with communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases, but rather from non-communicable diseases, or those that are often preventable, according to the Institute for Health Metrics. These are diseases like cardiovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and cancer, driven by factors like obesity, high blood pressure, poor diet and smoking.

So how can we live better lives? You may be surprised to find out the answer has nothing to do with the longevity biohacking health trends sweeping the internet. The real trick to living healthier for longer is deceptively simple: good sleep, exercise, social connection and nutrition, says Marcinek. 

Habits like picking up a sport or hobby, eating fewer processed foods, getting eight hours of good sleep a night and even expanding your social circle can greatly impact your health outcomes later in life. A lot of these changes can be put into place when people are younger or middle aged, says Marcinek, but often aren’t considered until it’s too late. 

“Your health and how you treat your body when you reach your middle age is going to have a big effect on your next several decades of life,” says Marcinek. “That doesn’t always connect with people.” 

There are, however, “a lot of exciting things on the horizon” as far as intervention before declining healthspan takes hold, says Marcinek. One that he is studying is the concept of “mitochondrially-targeted interventions,” or treatments that target the body’s ability to generate new mitochondria. “As you age, your ability to turn your old mitochondria over and make newer ones declines,” says Marcinek. And since mitochondria control “your ability to adapt to stressors,” improving the “recycling” of these cell components can improve health.

“In the last 10 years, there’s been a lot of exciting progress on identifying potential ways to intervene, but they’re not there yet where there’s enough solid evidence,” he says. 

Some longevity treatments draw from eastern traditions, such as Ayurvedic medicine, says Ehrlich. Ayurveda is a traditional Indian healthcare system which treats patients holistically, promoting good health as a means of disease prevention, rather than treatment. 

Neuroveda, which Ehrlich joined in 2019, combines several principles of medicine, including Ayurveda, functional medicine, herbal medicine, regenerative medicine, and naturopathic medicine. The practice starts with neurology because our nervous systems don’t live in isolation — they are deeply connected to the entirety of our being. 

As far as anti-aging, Neuroveda offers personalized longevity and performance programs that include health assessments, testing and treatments such as ayurvedic massage, custom IV therapies, and “plasmapheresis,” says Ehrlich, a process that removes and replaces a patient’s blood plasma as a means of detoxing. 

“Ayurveda really is the original longevity medicine, the original genetics medicine,” say Ehrlich. “My goal as a doctor is to help you live the number of years that you want.” 

David Coll, 62, had tried for years to get relief for his optic neuritis, a condition caused by swelling and inflammation of the optic nerve, after being hospitalized at Vancouver General Hospital for a week with pain in his eye that spread through his jaw, neck and shoulders. Though he worked with a functional medicine doctor, he was prescribed prednisone, which comes with both physical and emotional side effects, he says. 

He finally sought help across the border at Neuroveda, and after four plasmapheresis sessions and stem cell injections for the shoulder and neck pain, he was able to get off prednisone for the first time in over a year. 

“Don’t treat the symptoms,” says Coll. “Find someone that will help you get to the root core of your problem. Western medicine will tell you ‘It’s just old age,’ and ‘take more pills.’ I know there’s a lot of people out there with chronic pain, suffering and taking the wrong drugs.” 

Societal factors

Humans, however, are products of their environment, says Ehrlich. There are many factors to aging that are out of our hands entirely. Things like the environment or zip code you were born in, access to health resources in your early life, and proximity to pollution can all impact a person’s long-term health. Adverse childhood experiences, or trauma that occurs before the age of 18, can impact the diseases that people face as they age. 

“There’s a huge movement recognizing that social and political factors actually determine your health destiny,” says Ehrlich. 

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have some control over our health destiny, says Ehrlich. “I think a common misperception is that aging has to be awful and that there’s nothing you can do about it. I would love to inspire people to take their aging into their own hands.” 

The problem, however, is that “aging doesn’t occur to people until they’re aged,” says Marcinek. By the time many realize they need to live healthier to feel better, the damage has already been done. 

“There’s no question about it — as you age, you slow down. You decline. You’ve got more aches and pains,” says Marcinek. “I think there’s sort of a doom and gloom or nihilism associated with it. But there’s a lot of evidence now that there are things people can do to maintain a productive, happy, connected life well into their older age.”