In April 2024, Matt delivered a presentation at a two-day congressional briefing on longevity science hosted at Washington, D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel by the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI). Attendees included former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Republican Congressman Gus Bilirakis, and Democratic Congressman Paul Tonko. We have decided to include Matt's presentation on our channel because we believe it delivers a valuable message.

Healthcare has historically taken a piecemeal approach to diseases, addressing ailments in isolation. While this method has been successful at curing and sometimes even eradicating multiple diseases, it has its limitations. Aging is the single greatest risk factor for many of the chronic diseases we worry about in later life—think cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes—and involves a complex interplay of molecular, cellular, and physiological changes that underlie a myriad of health conditions. There is a reason that your average 80-year-old has more health problems than your average 18-year-old. As our understanding of human biology deepens, it is becoming increasingly evident that we need to broaden our focus beyond individual diseases and incorporate the biology of aging into strategies for improving human health and resilience to disease. Achieving this paradigm shift towards addressing the fundamental processes of aging, which will require interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, clinicians, policymakers, and the public, will give us the potential to mitigate multiple age-related diseases simultaneously.

In this episode, Matt covers how we got here, the differences between 19th and 21st century medicine, and the importance of targeting the biological aging process to create transformative results in tackling healthcare challenges. He also discusses policy reforms that would be useful for the cause, including changes to FDA regulation, a rethinking of insurance reimbursement, and how he would reslice the federal funding pie.

Check out the links below for further information and/or reading about some of the things we discussed in this podcast episode. Note that we do not necessarily endorse or agree with the content of these readings, but present them as supplementary material that may deepen your understanding of the topic after you listen to our podcast. This list is in no way exhaustive, but it’s a good start!

Is our healthcare system broken?

This blogpost describes the US healthcare system as expensive, complicated, dysfunctional, and broken. It details some of the issues associated with the US healthcare system, including a poor cost-patient satisfaction ratio, access disparities for disadvantaged groups, and distorted incentives among health insurance providers. It also mentions a misguided focus on disease care rather than on preventative care such as nutrition, exercise, and mental health care, and notes that doctors in disease care specialties such as cardiology and surgery tend to have much higher incomes than doctors who work in primary care.

The Patient Experience: Perspectives on Today's Healthcare

Market research and analytics company The Harris Poll partnered with the American Academy of Physician Associates to survey over 2,500 adults in the United States in early 2023 about US healthcare. The survey found that many adults are dissatisfied with the US healthcare system: 34 percent gave the system a C grade, compared to 10 percent who gave it an A grade. An excessive focus on treating illness and injury when they happen, rather than on preventing them way before their onset, was one of the survey's most common complaints.

Fiscal Year 2024 Budget

The fiscal year 2024 budget of the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States National Institutes of Health aimed at increasing healthy, active years of life in older adults, describes the NIA's research priorities. Several researchers in the geroscience field have expressed a wish for a greater proportion of the NIA budget to go toward studies of the biology of aging, rather than toward studies of individual diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The economic value of targeting aging

Published in 2021, this paper showed that a one-year increase in healthy life expectancy via targeting aging, as opposed to individual diseases, is worth $38 trillion in economic value. That number climbs to $367 trillion at 10 years of increased life expectancy. Those numbers might seem too big to be true, but they make more sense if we consider that delaying aging via a geroscience approach could potentially delay a huge number of age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, as well as diseases whose risk is far greater with advanced age, such as COVID-19.

Major longevity gains termed unlikely

In 1990, researchers at the University of Chicago published their findings that the average American lifespan would only enjoy a three-year gain even if scientists came up with a magic pill to cure all cancers and heart disease. This article covers that research and also presents views about aging that are quite different from those of geroscience today. "Barring a reversal of human aging on a molecular level, the rapid increases in life expectancy are over,” the study’s lead author S. Jay Olshansky said. Of course, 21st century geroscience is trying to investigate exactly what Olshansky mentions: the molecular specifics of human aging and how we can target those molecular mechanisms to address the functional declines and diseases of later life.