General Electric has recently been accused of accounting fraud for not properly reporting the cost of providing Long Term Care to old people on insurance policies sold many years ago.
All of the insurance companies that sold long-term care insurance have larger than previously expected expenses because decades ago they failed to anticipate the increase in life expectancy from 75 years to the over 80 years for many people.
The previous gains to longevity also tended to increase the number of years where someone was sick.
We could be on the verge of another demographic surprise where antiaging provides larger gains to lifespan. The new increases in longevity could come with vastly longer healthspan. We should stay healthier far longer. The period of time that we will be sick will be difficult to predict.
For at least the next, ten to fifteen years, people who want to apply lifestyle and medicine to apply the latest research in antiaging it will mostly be do-it-yourself. People will have to seek out open-minded doctors if they need certain prescriptions. There will also be options in terms of overseas pharmacies and clinics. Clearly, these options can have some more risks than working within the medical system. However, people have already used these alternative options for lower cost access to drugs like Viagra and Cialis.
How Many Will Go For the New Antiaging Options? Perhaps 1% have gone for comprehensive diet and exercise lifestyles that can add 7 years to lifespan. About 80% of the world does not smoke. About 85% of the US population does not smoke. 70% of the world is not obese.
The number of people following and sustaining the calorie restriction diet is perhaps only a few tens of thousands. There are far more trying the various forms of intermittent fasting.
There are some early antiaging drugs and supplements which seem to have some scientific evidence of some effectiveness. Those are metformin, NAD+ and other drugs.
Some studies indicate that metformin is half as effective as aggressive lifestyle management.
Lifestyle Modification
There are various diet and lifestyle modifications which can enable people to have a 1 in 2 chance to live to about 88 instead of 80 for men or 83 for women.
There a few million people who follow the Seventh-day Adventist lifestyle. There are other populations and lifestyles like the Okinawa diet.
There were a few roughly 30,000 person Seven-day Adventist participated in few health studies.
On average Adventist men live 7.3 years longer and Adventist women live 4.4 years longer than other Californians.
Five simple health behaviors promoted by the Seventh-day Adventist Church for more than 100 years (not smoking, eating a plant-based diet, eating nuts several times per week, regular exercise and maintaining normal body weight) increase life span up to 10 years.
* Reducing consumption of red and white meat was associated with a decrease of colon cancer.
* Eating legumes was protective for colon cancer.
* Eating nuts several times a week reduces the risk of heart attack by up to 50%.
* Eating whole bread instead of white bread reduced non-fatal heart attack risk by 45%.
* Drinking 5 or more glasses of water a day may reduce heart disease by 50%.
* Men who had a high consumption of tomatoes reduced their risk of prostate cancer by 40%.
* Drinking soy milk more than once daily may reduce prostate cancer by 70%.
Senolytics Drugs to Remove Senescent Cells
Senolytics Drugs extend the lifespan of mice by about 35% and newer drug protocols might achieve a 50% increase in mice lifespan.
For those who do not want to wait for Senolytics Drugs from biotech companies. There is an early adopter option.
Bill was at the Raadfest 2018, which is an antiaging conference which had an attendance of about 1000 people. Bill is like others who attend Raadfest who want to take any antiaging treatment which has some scientific evidence of effectiveness. There is the possibility that latest antiaging treatments could work and the early adopters might be able to improve their health and life 0 to 20 years longer.
Bill personally takes about 100 pills per day with the objective of extending his own life.
Bill is on a calorie restricted diet with intermittent fasting and is taking Metformin.
He also takes hormones and DHEA hormones. He has NAD+ infusions and is taking the Dasatinib-Quercetin drugs to remove senescent cells.
There is research that combining Dasatinib, a chemotherapy drug, with Quercetin, a plant flavonol can extend life. Taken together in clinical trials, the drug cocktail was shown to extend the life of lab mice by 36 percent.
The Dasatinib-Quercetin treatment was new for 2018. Bill and his team worked out what they believe is the correct twice a year dosage based on your weight. The dosage levels are shown below. Bill indicated that others who want to agressively adopt the latest anti-aging treatment can pay about $200 for a compounding pharmacy to provide the Dasatinib. A doctor’s prescription is needed.
AgeX Inducing Regeneration and Other Stem Cell Work
Nextbigfuture has had recent interviews with Dr. Michael West and Aubrey de Grey of AgeX.
AgeX is looking to apply stem cells and gene therapy-induced and telomerase tissue regeneration for antiaging.
Gene Therapy for Aging Reversal
George Church revealed progress on aging reversal using gene therapies. They have delivered 45 gene therapies to provide aging reversal. They find the combined treatment is effective against obesity, diabetes, osteoarthritis, cardiac damage and kidney disease.
The peer-reviewed paper on the age-reversing combination gene therapy should be published this year. There has been the rumor that the existing age-reversing combination gene therapy extended the lifespan of mice by 100%. This would be triple the effect of calorie restriction. If it was successfully applied to humans and had the same
At 32:00-33:30 minutes George Church specifically describes delivering 45 age-reversing gene therapies to treat multiple age-related diseases.
This is the work that Nextbigfuture has been expecting from George’s company Rejuvenate Bio.
Rejuvenate Bio has been using the aging reversal therapies on dogs for almost all of 2018.
George Church expects to get the treatment to people around 2025.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Brett’s understanding of universal life insurance policies and how they were affected in the 1980’s is flawed.
People in the UK can’t cut off their nose. They aren’t considered responsible enough to be allowed to have a knife.
You are aware that making an insurance company big enough to cover the entire country, and making it government owned and run, does nothing to solve the problem being discussed here?
It just means that when it runs out of money it’ll affect everyone at the same time and take the rest of the government finances down with it.
(Not that the USA doesn’t have some serious issues with their health industry. But the issues are at best only vaguely linked to the subject of this article.)
And yet Brett Bellmore just above reports a personal experience where the insurance company WAS able to wriggle out of most of their obligation once they convinced the court that they just couldn’t meet them.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter if the obligation isn’t legally wiped out. If there’s no money then the payments will not be made.
I’d guessed it was bankrupt, but I wasn’t sure.
The policyholders are the ones who got the better end of the deal. It’s the reinsurers (like GE) that are losing their shirts.
Insurance company obligations cannot be wiped out through bankruptcy.
That’s kind of cutting your nose off to spite your face, you know.
If I were relying on such a policy, I’d be sweating right now.
Back in the early 80’s, I bought a universal life policy, which a very nice guaranteed rate of return of 9%. The insurance company was counting on inflation staying high, I was counting on it dropping again.
I proved right, inflation dropped back to the low single digits, and I was pouring every cent I could into that policy, and looking at retiring in my early 40’s. Until I got a letter from the insurance company, explaining that they’d gone to a judge, and gotten the policy unilaterally revised, and the guaranteed rate of return was now 3%.
That really clarified my understanding of how much you could rely on contracts with large financial institutions.
Screw the insurance companies, get yourselves an NHS!
Bankrupt.
See how much time I’m saving
If healthspan extension plays out, the easiest solution for pensions etc is to switch to a proportional model: X years of pension for Y years of work. But with automation the whole work part goes belly up. But then, once the cost of covering basic needs becomes negligible, pensions may not be needed either. At that point, I expect people will only work to pay for luxuries and for self-fulfillment, if at all.
Sorry – “BK”? Bankrupt? Bonkers? Big Kasino? Burger King? I seem to have missed out learning this internet abbreviation.
<<If this stuff goes down then laws will be changed.>>
Understatement
Senolytics are exciting because they are damage removal, not a drug trying to alter your metabolism to run slightly better in the presence of damage.
The car analogy is replacing lost oil to keep your car’s engine lubricated, rather than using a supplementary fuel such as laughing gas to make the engine work harder without proper lubrication.
The next genuine damage repair therapy to hit clinical trials and then the market will probably be glucosepane cross link removal. A company called Revel LLC should be spun out of Yale at some point. this research was part funded by the SENS Research Foundation.
I’m betting on automation and AI for the short term, but it’s a perfect storm of technologies out there for life extension as well, someone is apt to hit it. If they do I’m betting my pension will eventually cash out rather than keep paying me for half a century longer than they planned. If this stuff goes down then laws will be changed. Even Social Security will start reneging.
About twenty years back I played around with a book outline for a story where big pharma suddenly announces a pill that, taken daily, stops aging. Problem was there are too many possibilities.
Obviously, there would be market crashes. But what would people do? Quit jobs they don’t like to remake their lives (doubtful). Will life insurance be more valuable, or less? It just goes on and on. Most people already spend and save (don’t save) as if they never have to consider retirement. What would it do if all they had to do was pay for a pill every day? How many people would get slack about taking it? Or decide it was the work of the devil? Crazy stuff.
If you believe this, you should invest in straight life annuities – or short companies that sell them.
They should go BK when people start to believe that extreme longevity is likely.