August 27, 2012 – The Downside of Up Life-Expectancy

Here’s a jaw-dropping statistic: “Since 1900, the life expectancy of Americans has jumped to just shy of 80 from 47 years.”

Among so many significant developments of the 20th Century, this may be one of the most far-reaching: and it gets so little press, compared to advances in transportation, communications, electrical power, data-processing and all the rest.

Walk through any older graveyard, and take note of the lifespans cut into the 19th century headstones. Stroll over into the newer section, and do the same for the stones from the last decade or so.  Then, do the math.

You’ll experience your own little “Wow!” moment.

We’ve been making huge progress, as a society, fighting cancer – which partly explains the increase in life expectancy, of course. Yet, those numbers also do their part to blunt the remarkable gains in cancer prevention and treatment.  They make them seem less impressive than they really are.

Here’s why. 

We all know cancer is an old person’s disease.  Not every cancer, of course. Small numbers of the young can be afflicted as well, and it’s especially heartbreaking when that happens.  Yet, the chances of getting most cancers go up with each decade of life: way up, once you pass 60 or so.

In 1900, when people were dying at the age of 47, on the average, most of them were succumbing to other maladies before they even made it into the prime cancer years. So many cancers are influenced by genetics: at a certain age, some mysterious, pre-programmed switch in the DNA gets thrown into the “on” position. Then, some of our cells start morphing into predators and lunching on those around them.

Sometimes, I hear people of my generation comment with alarm on how many of their friends are getting moles cut off, or undergoing mastectomies, or following the same chemotherapy path I and a few others of us have unintentionally pioneered. The cancer rate must surely be going up, they exclaim!

It’s not – at least, not if the effects of aging are controlled for.  What’s going up is their age, and the age of their contemporaries.  That, in itself, accounts for a whole lot of cancers.

Want to know what the leading cause of cancer really is?  It’s getting old.

What a paradox! With each new advance in cancer treatment, average life expectancy goes up.  Yet, for all those cancers that are prevented or successfully treated, the chances of getting other cancers increase, due to the demographics.

You’ve really got to feel for the cancer researchers.  They work so hard, and they announce their latest successes in triumph, but their numbers don’t look nearly so good as they would, were the average lifespan not also increasing.  They’re walking up the down escalator.

In the August 25th New York Times, David Ewing Duncan poses the very reasonable, but creepy, question of whether some of these medical advances are really worth it. He says he’s in the habit of polling his lecture audiences, asking for a show of hands as to how long they truly want to live. “I provided,” he says, “four possible answers: 80 years, currently the average life span in the West; 120 years, close to the maximum anyone has lived; 150 years, which would require a biotech breakthrough; and forever, which rejects the idea that life span has to have any limit at all.”

Before voting, he tells his audiences, they should assume that aging, as we know it, would continue. His question is simply about longevity that could be gained through eliminating life-threatening illnesses, not a matter of freezing the normal aging process. He’s not offering the opportunity, in his thought-experiment, for people to remain forever 30, or 40, or whatever ideal degree of physical maturity they’d care to name.

The majority — 60% — say they don’t want to live past 80. Another 30% declare they’re willing to power on through all the usual infirmities of aging, finally dying at 120. Nearly another 10% want to boldly go where no one has gone before, and live to 150. Only a tiny fraction put up their hands to say they want to live longer than that.

Duncan goes on to report that medical researchers are on the verge of a number of breakthroughs that could push the average life expectancy up even higher. Among these are medications to reduce inflammation of the coronary arteries, as well as various stem-cell therapies. The growing field of bionics — developing replacement hardware for the body, like cardiac pacemakers, brain implants for Parkinson’s sufferers, even artificial hearts — offers to add even more years to the average age at death.

“Curiously,” Duncan goes on, “after learning about these possibilities, few people wanted to change their votes. Even if I asked them to imagine that a pill had been invented to slow aging down by one-half, allowing a person who is, say, 60 years old to have the body of a 30-year-old, only about 10 percent of audiences switched to favoring a life span of 150 years.”

For many of those who don’t want to change their vote, it’s the various infirmities of aging that scare them off.  For others, it’s concern for younger generations, who would find the staircases to so many joys and achievements blocked by their elders, shuffling around on the landings above them. For still others, it’s about worry for the environment — whether the earth can truly sustain very many more people than are already here.

The tiny minority who do want to live longer speculate that we have no way of knowing what such super-centenarians could accomplish, with their added wisdom and life-experience. What new gizmo could a genius like Steve Jobs come out with, if he lived to 150?

We do know, Duncan concludes, that Albert Einstein was very clear about his own wishes, near the end of his life: “As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he refused surgery, saying: ‘It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.’”

Let’s hear it for everyone being given the opportunity to live long enough to still die elegantly!