Life Span ---- Health Span, There’s an Important Difference

As I’ve attended conferences and stayed abreast of healthcare issues, a new phrase has begun to surface – health span. It certainly caught my attention, and I began to dig into this new (at least new to me) concept. We all know what life span means, the time from our birth to our death. We use that term mostly when we are talking about the average or projected time that a group or category of people will live. We’ve all heard ads that tell us that doing certain healthy things will help us live longer or how medicines and certain procedures will lengthen our lives. Our average life span is longer because of these new medicines and procedures but what is the quality of life in this prolonged life? That’s the crux of health span. Our health span is the number of years we spend in good health, without any of the chronic conditions or disabilities that are often part of aging. That really is an important difference.

Over the last century our life span has increased by 29.5 years. According to UCLA health, the average life span now for men is 75 years and for women it’s 80 years while they estimate the health span to be 63 years for men and 65 for women. I think we’ve always knew there was a difference. We understood that when an older person had to give up the car keys or when they needed help getting around or when they began to forget important things, that the quality of their life was diminished. We maybe didn’t define it as the end of their health span, but we knew there was a good chance that some of the joy in their life was diminished.

We’ve also known that when this transition happened, how it was dealt with in our healthcare system could save money and, in some ways, make this time less onerous for the person. In my past leadership of senior’s organizations, I have emphasized the importance of aging in place. It was a “no brainer” to deduce that keeping a person out of institutional care and in their home saved money and greatly increased their joy. So, now that we have a name for this time in our lives and people are recognizing its importance, the big question is . . . how can I increase my health span?

We all know the standard ways.

·       Eat healthy

·       Exercise

·       Manage your number - cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar

·       Kick bad habits

·       Manage stress

·       Get 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep

·       Stay socially connected

Some of us don’t do any of these things, most of us do some of these things, a few of us do all of these things. We all know it would help our life span if we did them, but it can be difficult. Take managing your stress for instance. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that followed older adults for decades found that people with more positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those who were stuck on the negatives. It just proves the theory I’ve heard all my life that living long is just a matter of having the right attitude, that age is just a number. The real problem is how do you get people to have a more positive attitude or, in the case of chronic conditions and disabilities, how do you delay the onset of these conditions to lengthen their health span. From the conferences I’ve been to, the people I’ve talked with and the research I’ve done, here’s what I think will have an impact on lengthening our health span.

·       Early detection – At the Consumer Electronics Show I saw a huge increase in home based and wearable monitoring devices. These devices can monitor different organs and vital signs 24 hours a day for very long periods of time. It isn’t hard to visualize a time when an abnormality is instantly detected, and you or your doctor is notified. To me, early detection is the most important variable in improving our health span.

·       Aging in place – With the increase in monitors and communication that can be installed in your home, the longer you can stay in your home, a place that is conducive to keeping you healthy and happy.

·       Easier treatment – Things like non-invasive surgery, alternatives to treatments with harsh side effects, like long sessions of chemotherapy, and the ability to replace joints, all work to keep us healthy even as are body ages.

·       Expanded transportation options – Even though some of us can’t imagine being driven around in a driverless car, the thought of being able to be independent even though you’ve had to give up driving is exciting.

I’m sure there are other things that will be helpful in expanding our health span. People are beginning to talk more and more about the importance of lengthening the time we are productive and independent. The Make America Healthy Again movement offers fertile ground for increasing our focus on early detection and prevention. I can’t think of anything more valuable than a few more years of golfing, cruising or just being able to travel to see my loved ones.

One word of warning. The lure of a cure for what ails us is as old as snake oil. The siren song of promising a few more years of health will produce a deluge of medicines and gimmicks of questionable value. I think that the advances in the areas listed above will bear fruit quicker than we think, we can’t be impatient. Your doctor knows you and is the best source of matching the new medicines and procedures to your personal needs, giving you the best chance at lengthening your health span. These are exciting times, who knows, I may even start exercising.

Best, Thair