{"id":22,"date":"2012-11-10T21:58:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T21:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshmitteldorf.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=22"},"modified":"2012-11-10T22:00:34","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T22:00:34","slug":"mortality-and-life-expectancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2012\/11\/10\/mortality-and-life-expectancy\/","title":{"rendered":"Mortality and Life Expectancy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read a few weeks ago about a study where vitamin D supplementation reduced all-cause mortality rates by 6%. How many years would that add to life expectancy? I wondered.<\/p>\n

6% of a 75-year life span would mean 4\u00bd extra years, I thought, na\u00efvely.<\/p>\n

I pulled up a mortality table (from the Social Security Admin<\/a>) \u00a0and did the calculation in a spreadsheet. The two lines were barely distinguishable. A 6% drop in mortality only increases life expectancy by 7 months.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This plot is telling us something deep about the way in which biological aging works. The death rate climbs rapidly with age, and effectively imposes an upper limit on life span that is difficult to circumvent.<\/p>\n

If the death rate did not increase with age, then it would be true that subtracting 6% from mortality would add about 6% to life expectancy. That\u2019s where the intuition came from about 4\u00bd years. But with a death rate that increases with age, you \u201chave to work a lot harder\u201d to get an improvement in life expectancy. And in reality, the mortality curve doesn\u2019t just rise with age \u2013 it rises at an accelerating rate.<\/p>\n

For late life, the mortality curve becomes a wall of death.<\/p>\n

The general relationship between mortality and life expectancy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once I had set up the spreadsheet, it\u2019s easy enough to ask the general question: How much does life expectancy improve for a given change in mortality? The answer I found was: very slowly<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To add just 5 years to life expectancy, we would need to slash the mortality rate by more than 40%. This is a counter-intuitive statistic \u2013 and a discouraging one. By optimistic accounts<\/a>, taking a daily aspirin or ibuprofen lowers mortality by 13%. \u00a0But even this major drop translates to only 2 years. From another perspective, 2 years is a windfall. Aspirin costs practically nothing and imposes minimal risk and less inconvenience.<\/p>\n

The optimistic way to see this relationship<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is another perspective on the \u201cwall of death\u201d, about which advocates of life extension have written compellingly. In medical research, we are working piecemeal to chip away at the mortality rate from one disease and another. But if the fundamental rate of aging can be slowed, this will push the curve not down but to the right. This will have as much benefit as many decades of progress in cancer and heart disease.<\/p>\n

Caloric restriction offers a bit of this. CR mimetics, therapies that focus on gene expression and signaling may offer a health dividend comparable to the collective product of all of 20th century medical science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a few weeks ago about a study where vitamin D supplementation reduced all-cause mortality rates by 6%. How many years would that add to life expectancy? I wondered. 6% of a 75-year life span would mean 4\u00bd extra years, I thought, na\u00efvely. I pulled up a mortality table (from the Social Security Admin) … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMortality and Life Expectancy - Josh Mitteldorf<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2012\/11\/10\/mortality-and-life-expectancy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mortality and Life Expectancy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I read a few weeks ago about a study where vitamin D supplementation reduced all-cause mortality rates by 6%. 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The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. 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