From Life Span to Health Span: Declaring "Victory" in the Pursuit of Human Longevity

A difficult dilemma has presented itself in the current era. Modern medicine and advances in the medical sciences are tightly focused on a quest to find ways to extend life-without considering either the consequences of success or the best way to pursue it. From the perspective of physicians treating their patients, it makes sense to help them overcome immediate health challenges, but further life extension in increasingly more aged bodies will expose the saved population to an elevated risk of even more disabling health conditions associated with aging. Extended survival brought forth by innovations designed to treat diseases will likely push more people into a "red zone"-a later phase in life when the risk of frailty and disability rises exponentially. The inescapable conclusion from these observations is that life extension should no longer be the primary goal of medicine when applied to long-lived populations. The principal outcome and most important metric of success should be the extension of health span, and the technological advances described herein that are most likely to make the extension of healthy life possible.