[The time of our lives]

Prior to the industrial revolution in the mid-1800 s, the modal lifespan for humans was somewhat less than 75 years. Natural life expectancy was approximately 35 years, with a high child mortality rate strongly contributing to this low figure. At that time, natural life expectancy of someone aged 75 was 6 years, whereas the current life expectancy of, for example, a 75-year-old French woman is 14.5 years. The sharp increase in longevity means an added eight years of life in old age. Nevertheless, the rate of ageing, i.e. the degree of mortality-risk increase related to age, remains astonishingly constant. Preventive strategies that use the absolute risk of age-related diseases for setting treatment goals, in fact treat increasing age. For each population, the risk reaches its peak at a certain age; over a lifetime, the risk of death is always 100%. Under pressure from modern society and medicine, old age is now treated as a disease and medicalised to a great degree. To improve medical management of elderly patients, we will have to accustom ourselves to consider the goals of these actions, to ask ourselves: what is called wisdom?