**Factors Affecting Lifespan and Life Expectancy:**
– Aging is influenced by genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, and oxidative damage from free radicals.
– Factors affecting lifespan include DNA repair efficiency, antioxidant defenses, and energy metabolism.
– The longest documented human lifespan is 122 years and 164 days.
– Improved medical care, vaccinations, good diet, exercise, and avoiding hazards can extend life expectancy.
**Biomedical Approaches to Life Extension:**
– Senolytics, senomorphic drugs, and prolongevity drug candidates like rapamycin, metformin, and NAD+ enhancers are studied to delay, prevent, or reverse age-related diseases.
– Antioxidant supplements may not extend human life and could have adverse effects like inhibiting adaptation to exercise.
– Mitochondria may respond beneficially to low oxidative damage.
– Research focuses on mitigating side effects and determining optimal treatment schedules for prolongevity drugs.
**Personalized and Advanced Interventions for Life Extension:**
– Tailoring interventions based on age and genome, precision medicine, and exploration of peptides like MOTS-c are emphasized.
– Advanced biosciences approaches include genetic and epigenetic alterations, cellular reprogramming, stem-cell interventions, nanomedicine research, and tissue engineering.
– Hormone treatments like growth hormone therapy and investigations into Klotho and exerkines for longevity are being explored.
**Societal and Political Aspects of Life Extension:**
– Societal strategies include addressing common causes of death, combating global life expectancy loss due to air pollution, regular screening, and promoting longevity diets in healthcare.
– Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel heavily invest in anti-aging research.
– Political parties in various countries support radical life extension to provide political backing for research and ensure a smooth transition to a society without aging.
**Controversies and Ethical Considerations in Life Extension:**
– Critics debate aging as a disease and the profit-driven nature of the anti-aging industry.
– Consumer motivations for using anti-aging products range from hoped-for self to feared-self.
– Overpopulation concerns and ethical debates surrounding cryonics, cyborg technology, and strategies like Engineered Negligible Senescence are prevalent.
– Scientific research organizations like the A4M, SENS Research Foundation, and Human Longevity Inc. focus on anti-aging research.
Life extension is the concept of extending the human lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled biological limit of around 125 years. Several researchers in the area, along with "life extensionists", "immortalists", or "longevists" (those who wish to achieve longer lives themselves), postulate that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement (such as with artificial organs or xenotransplantations) will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition (agerasia). The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists.
The sale of purported anti-aging products such as supplements and hormone replacement is a lucrative global industry. For example, the industry that promotes the use of hormones as a treatment for consumers to slow or reverse the aging process in the US market generated about $50 billion of revenue a year in 2009. The use of such hormone products has not been proven to be effective or safe.