Journal article
The economic value of targeting aging
- Abstract:
- Developments in life expectancy and the growing emphasis on biological and ‘healthy’ aging raise a number of important questions for health scientists and economists alike. Is it preferable to make lives healthier by compressing morbidity, or longer by extending life? What are the gains from targeting aging itself compared to efforts to eradicate specific diseases? Here we analyze existing data to evaluate the economic value of increases in life expectancy, improvements in health and treatments that target aging. We show that a compression of morbidity that improves health is more valuable than further increases in life expectancy, and that targeting aging offers potentially larger economic gains than eradicating individual diseases. We show that a slowdown in aging that increases life expectancy by 1 year is worth US$38 trillion, and by 10 years, US$367 trillion. Ultimately, the more progress that is made in improving how we age, the greater the value of further improvements.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s43587-021-00080-0
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Aging More from this journal
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 7
- Pages:
- 616–623
- Publication date:
- 2021-07-05
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-05-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2662-8465
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1170787
- Local pid:
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pubs:1170787
- Deposit date:
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2021-04-07
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Scott et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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