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Red Flag: Suicide risk
How AI is helping prevent suicide in veterans
Medically reviewed by Jennifer Casarella, MD
Dan Miller has parked his Nissan Altima on the side of the road near a field outside Chicago and is holding a gun to his head.
Haunted for years by the compounded trauma of tours of duty in the Middle East and his work as a police officer in Chicago, at that moment, Dr. Miller saw no reason to live. And there were troubles at home with his wife and children, who had grown fearful of his behavior.
“My whole world was falling apart,” he says of that dark night in 2014. “It left a hole I didn’t know how to fill.”
He chose not to pull the trigger after a brochure on the passenger seat of his car gave him an unexpected perspective – and launched him on a path to help others in his situation.
Had Mr. Miller taken his life that night, he would have joined thousands of other veterans who died by suicide. About 17 U.S. veterans lose their lives this way each day, on average, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2019, the last year for which records are available, 6,261 veterans took their own lives – and the suicide rate for veterans was 52% higher than for nonveterans, the agency’s records show.
The problem has become so severe that
But that wasn’t available when Dan Miller’s life was unraveling.
In the years leading up to his near-suicide, his wife had pushed him to get help. “She said, ‘You’re not the same person you were when you left. The kids are scared of you. The pets are scared of you,” he recalls.
He resisted, even when his wife threatened divorce. Rising through the ranks of the Marines, Mr. Miller had become more emotionally isolated. He feared losing his job and the respect of others if he let anyone know what he was going through.
Finally, he gave the VHA a chance. He went in for an initial consultation in 2010 and didn’t find it helpful. He didn’t like being told what to do. So he stopped. He turned to obsessive exercise and excessive drinking.
That day in 2014, Mr. Miller’s wife told him she was taking the kids out for a playdate. After she left, he was served with divorce papers. Less than an hour later, he was parked in his car with his gun, ready to end his life.
But if it all had happened just a few years later, things might never have gotten to that point.
Scanning for suicide risk
In 2017, the VHA piloted its AI program, called REACH VET, that aims to help prevent veterans from dying by suicide.
Every month, a computer scans the electronic health records of all VHA patients who’ve had a health care visit for any reason in the last 2 years. It checks more than 140 variables and weights them to estimate someone’s overall suicide risk at that moment in time.
To build the risk algorithm, a computer combed through the medical records of 6,360 veterans confirmed to have died by suicide between 2009 and 2011. (The VHA continually updates the list of variables from the health records of VHA patients, including those who have died by suicide since then and others.)
Some variables are things you’d expect:
- A past suicide attempt.
- A diagnosis of depression or other mental illness.
- A diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Others are more surprising. For example, a diagnosis of arthritis or diabetes adds weight.
REACH VET flags the riskiest cases – the top 0.1% – for a mental health or primary care provider to review. They reach out to the patient to tell them how and why their record was flagged, discuss any recommended treatment changes, and ask them to come in for a visit.
“It’s an opportunity to talk about their risk factors, which is designed to lead to a conversation about safety planning,” says clinical psychologist Matthew Miller, PhD, national director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Suicide Prevention Program. He’s not related to Dan Miller.
Making a suicide safety plan
A safety plan is a document that outlines how a person can help prevent their own suicide in a crisis.
The plan may include:
- A list of personal triggers or warning signs.
- What’s helped them in the past.
- Names of people or organizations who can support them.
- Plans to remove means of suicide, such as guns, from their environment.
- Their reasons for living.
In people at risk for suicide, research shows that having a safety plan reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, lowers rates of depression and hopelessness, and boosts veterans’ engagement with the health care system. It may also help people manage things that trigger their suicidal thoughts.
Getting the call
What if REACH VET had been around when Dan Miller was in crisis – and he’d gotten a call from the VHA?
“It absolutely, positively would have helped because one of the biggest things on that day when I got served was feeling completely alone and that I had no one to turn to,” Mr. Miller says. He’s now a speaker for the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that serves veterans and active-duty service people.
Vets’ reactions to the unexpected VHA phone call, psychologist Dr. Miller says, “run the gamut from ‘Thank you for contacting me. Let’s talk,’ to ‘What are you talking about? Leave me alone!’ ”
Nothing stops all suicides. But REACH VET is having an impact. In a clinical trial, vets contacted through REACH VET had more doctor visits, were more likely to have a written suicide prevention safety plan, and had fewer hospital admissions for mental health, ER visits, and suicide attempts.
An assist from AI
Even simple outreach can make a big difference. And there’s research to prove it.
One study included 4,730 veterans recently discharged from psychiatric care at the VHA, a group considered at high risk for suicide.
Half of them got 13 caring emails from hospital staff in the weeks after leaving the hospital. The emails mentioned personal things the patient had shared, like a love of hiking, and wished them well. The other veterans got routine follow-up but no emails.
Two years later, those who got the caring emails were less likely to have died by suicide than the other vets. The study was published in 2014 in Contemporary Clinical Trials.
Researchers have done studies like this many times: with handwritten notes from the primary care doctor, postcards from the ER, and so forth. The results never vary: The notes reduce suicide risk.
“If we could use AI to identify people to receive notes or phone calls, it would be a very effective and inexpensive way to guide follow-up care,” says Rebecca Bernert, PhD, director and founder of the Suicide Prevention Research Laboratory at Stanford (Calif.) University.
AI doesn’t replace clinical judgment.
“AI can capture data that we miss due to the limits of our humanity,” psychologist Dr. Miller says. “There’s suicide prevention processes founded on big data and AI, and there are processes founded in clinical intuition and acumen.”
AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. If that data lacks diversity, it may miss things. And variables that apply to veterans may differ in civilians.
Stopping suicidal thoughts
Google is putting AI to work against suicide, too. Its MUM (Multitask Unified Model) technology seeks to understand the intent behind what we google.
MUM powers Google Search. It can often tell the difference between a search for information about suicide for someone writing a research paper on the topic and a search for information on how or where to carry out a suicide.
When Google Search detects that someone in the United States might be in crisis and at risk of suicide, the first search results that person gets are the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and other resources for people in crisis.
Google Home Assistant works in the same way. When a user makes a query that signals a suicide-related crisis, the gadget serves up resources that offer help.
MUM is working to understand the nuances of crisis language in 75 languages so that Google Search can provide people in crisis with hotlines or other resources in many countries.
“We want to find partners that are accessible to users in terms of hours of operation. We have a strong preference for finding partners that promise confidentiality and privacy to the extent that those are permitted [in that country],” says Anne Merritt, MD, a product manager at Google Search.
Other companies are working on apps that use AI to spot suicide risk in other ways, including voice technology that may notice subtle changes in the voice of someone who’s depressed and may be thinking of suicide. Those are still in development but show promise. Keep in mind that apps do not require government approval, so if you try one, be sure to let your health care provider know.
Changing the channel
Seeing a hotline number on your phone or computer screen can help, Dan Miller says. “If I happened to be online, searching maybe for a bridge to jump off of ... and suddenly that pops up on the screen, it’s like it changes the channel.”
It may not work for everyone, he says, but that search result could interrupt someone’s suicidal train of thought.
That’s crucial, psychologist Dr. Miller says, because most suicide attempts escalate from first thought to potentially fatal action in just 1 hour. That’s how fast it happened for Dan Miller in 2014.
“When you’re able to put time and space between the suicidal thought and the access to the method to act on that thought, you save lives,” Dr. Bernert says.
Making a different choice
An interruption in Mr. Miller’s thinking is what had saved his life.
Holding the gun to his head, Mr. Miller looked over at the passenger seat at a brochure from Wounded Warrior Project, which he had just learned about. Mr. Miller noticed a photo of a man in a wheelchair, a veteran like him, who had no legs. He thought that the man looked worse off than him but hadn’t given up.
Mr. Miller put down his gun and decided to get help.
Recovering from a near suicide attempt, he says, is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. Now, 8 years later, Mr. Miller is planning a brief break from the speaker circuit. He plans to spend 2 weeks in an outpatient counseling program for posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.
“Telling my story to strangers – part of it is healing me in a way, but I’m learning that repeating the story over and over again is also keeping me from letting it go. And I’m still healing.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.
How AI is helping prevent suicide in veterans
How AI is helping prevent suicide in veterans
Medically reviewed by Jennifer Casarella, MD
Dan Miller has parked his Nissan Altima on the side of the road near a field outside Chicago and is holding a gun to his head.
Haunted for years by the compounded trauma of tours of duty in the Middle East and his work as a police officer in Chicago, at that moment, Dr. Miller saw no reason to live. And there were troubles at home with his wife and children, who had grown fearful of his behavior.
“My whole world was falling apart,” he says of that dark night in 2014. “It left a hole I didn’t know how to fill.”
He chose not to pull the trigger after a brochure on the passenger seat of his car gave him an unexpected perspective – and launched him on a path to help others in his situation.
Had Mr. Miller taken his life that night, he would have joined thousands of other veterans who died by suicide. About 17 U.S. veterans lose their lives this way each day, on average, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2019, the last year for which records are available, 6,261 veterans took their own lives – and the suicide rate for veterans was 52% higher than for nonveterans, the agency’s records show.
The problem has become so severe that
But that wasn’t available when Dan Miller’s life was unraveling.
In the years leading up to his near-suicide, his wife had pushed him to get help. “She said, ‘You’re not the same person you were when you left. The kids are scared of you. The pets are scared of you,” he recalls.
He resisted, even when his wife threatened divorce. Rising through the ranks of the Marines, Mr. Miller had become more emotionally isolated. He feared losing his job and the respect of others if he let anyone know what he was going through.
Finally, he gave the VHA a chance. He went in for an initial consultation in 2010 and didn’t find it helpful. He didn’t like being told what to do. So he stopped. He turned to obsessive exercise and excessive drinking.
That day in 2014, Mr. Miller’s wife told him she was taking the kids out for a playdate. After she left, he was served with divorce papers. Less than an hour later, he was parked in his car with his gun, ready to end his life.
But if it all had happened just a few years later, things might never have gotten to that point.
Scanning for suicide risk
In 2017, the VHA piloted its AI program, called REACH VET, that aims to help prevent veterans from dying by suicide.
Every month, a computer scans the electronic health records of all VHA patients who’ve had a health care visit for any reason in the last 2 years. It checks more than 140 variables and weights them to estimate someone’s overall suicide risk at that moment in time.
To build the risk algorithm, a computer combed through the medical records of 6,360 veterans confirmed to have died by suicide between 2009 and 2011. (The VHA continually updates the list of variables from the health records of VHA patients, including those who have died by suicide since then and others.)
Some variables are things you’d expect:
- A past suicide attempt.
- A diagnosis of depression or other mental illness.
- A diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Others are more surprising. For example, a diagnosis of arthritis or diabetes adds weight.
REACH VET flags the riskiest cases – the top 0.1% – for a mental health or primary care provider to review. They reach out to the patient to tell them how and why their record was flagged, discuss any recommended treatment changes, and ask them to come in for a visit.
“It’s an opportunity to talk about their risk factors, which is designed to lead to a conversation about safety planning,” says clinical psychologist Matthew Miller, PhD, national director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Suicide Prevention Program. He’s not related to Dan Miller.
Making a suicide safety plan
A safety plan is a document that outlines how a person can help prevent their own suicide in a crisis.
The plan may include:
- A list of personal triggers or warning signs.
- What’s helped them in the past.
- Names of people or organizations who can support them.
- Plans to remove means of suicide, such as guns, from their environment.
- Their reasons for living.
In people at risk for suicide, research shows that having a safety plan reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, lowers rates of depression and hopelessness, and boosts veterans’ engagement with the health care system. It may also help people manage things that trigger their suicidal thoughts.
Getting the call
What if REACH VET had been around when Dan Miller was in crisis – and he’d gotten a call from the VHA?
“It absolutely, positively would have helped because one of the biggest things on that day when I got served was feeling completely alone and that I had no one to turn to,” Mr. Miller says. He’s now a speaker for the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that serves veterans and active-duty service people.
Vets’ reactions to the unexpected VHA phone call, psychologist Dr. Miller says, “run the gamut from ‘Thank you for contacting me. Let’s talk,’ to ‘What are you talking about? Leave me alone!’ ”
Nothing stops all suicides. But REACH VET is having an impact. In a clinical trial, vets contacted through REACH VET had more doctor visits, were more likely to have a written suicide prevention safety plan, and had fewer hospital admissions for mental health, ER visits, and suicide attempts.
An assist from AI
Even simple outreach can make a big difference. And there’s research to prove it.
One study included 4,730 veterans recently discharged from psychiatric care at the VHA, a group considered at high risk for suicide.
Half of them got 13 caring emails from hospital staff in the weeks after leaving the hospital. The emails mentioned personal things the patient had shared, like a love of hiking, and wished them well. The other veterans got routine follow-up but no emails.
Two years later, those who got the caring emails were less likely to have died by suicide than the other vets. The study was published in 2014 in Contemporary Clinical Trials.
Researchers have done studies like this many times: with handwritten notes from the primary care doctor, postcards from the ER, and so forth. The results never vary: The notes reduce suicide risk.
“If we could use AI to identify people to receive notes or phone calls, it would be a very effective and inexpensive way to guide follow-up care,” says Rebecca Bernert, PhD, director and founder of the Suicide Prevention Research Laboratory at Stanford (Calif.) University.
AI doesn’t replace clinical judgment.
“AI can capture data that we miss due to the limits of our humanity,” psychologist Dr. Miller says. “There’s suicide prevention processes founded on big data and AI, and there are processes founded in clinical intuition and acumen.”
AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. If that data lacks diversity, it may miss things. And variables that apply to veterans may differ in civilians.
Stopping suicidal thoughts
Google is putting AI to work against suicide, too. Its MUM (Multitask Unified Model) technology seeks to understand the intent behind what we google.
MUM powers Google Search. It can often tell the difference between a search for information about suicide for someone writing a research paper on the topic and a search for information on how or where to carry out a suicide.
When Google Search detects that someone in the United States might be in crisis and at risk of suicide, the first search results that person gets are the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and other resources for people in crisis.
Google Home Assistant works in the same way. When a user makes a query that signals a suicide-related crisis, the gadget serves up resources that offer help.
MUM is working to understand the nuances of crisis language in 75 languages so that Google Search can provide people in crisis with hotlines or other resources in many countries.
“We want to find partners that are accessible to users in terms of hours of operation. We have a strong preference for finding partners that promise confidentiality and privacy to the extent that those are permitted [in that country],” says Anne Merritt, MD, a product manager at Google Search.
Other companies are working on apps that use AI to spot suicide risk in other ways, including voice technology that may notice subtle changes in the voice of someone who’s depressed and may be thinking of suicide. Those are still in development but show promise. Keep in mind that apps do not require government approval, so if you try one, be sure to let your health care provider know.
Changing the channel
Seeing a hotline number on your phone or computer screen can help, Dan Miller says. “If I happened to be online, searching maybe for a bridge to jump off of ... and suddenly that pops up on the screen, it’s like it changes the channel.”
It may not work for everyone, he says, but that search result could interrupt someone’s suicidal train of thought.
That’s crucial, psychologist Dr. Miller says, because most suicide attempts escalate from first thought to potentially fatal action in just 1 hour. That’s how fast it happened for Dan Miller in 2014.
“When you’re able to put time and space between the suicidal thought and the access to the method to act on that thought, you save lives,” Dr. Bernert says.
Making a different choice
An interruption in Mr. Miller’s thinking is what had saved his life.
Holding the gun to his head, Mr. Miller looked over at the passenger seat at a brochure from Wounded Warrior Project, which he had just learned about. Mr. Miller noticed a photo of a man in a wheelchair, a veteran like him, who had no legs. He thought that the man looked worse off than him but hadn’t given up.
Mr. Miller put down his gun and decided to get help.
Recovering from a near suicide attempt, he says, is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. Now, 8 years later, Mr. Miller is planning a brief break from the speaker circuit. He plans to spend 2 weeks in an outpatient counseling program for posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.
“Telling my story to strangers – part of it is healing me in a way, but I’m learning that repeating the story over and over again is also keeping me from letting it go. And I’m still healing.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.
Medically reviewed by Jennifer Casarella, MD
Dan Miller has parked his Nissan Altima on the side of the road near a field outside Chicago and is holding a gun to his head.
Haunted for years by the compounded trauma of tours of duty in the Middle East and his work as a police officer in Chicago, at that moment, Dr. Miller saw no reason to live. And there were troubles at home with his wife and children, who had grown fearful of his behavior.
“My whole world was falling apart,” he says of that dark night in 2014. “It left a hole I didn’t know how to fill.”
He chose not to pull the trigger after a brochure on the passenger seat of his car gave him an unexpected perspective – and launched him on a path to help others in his situation.
Had Mr. Miller taken his life that night, he would have joined thousands of other veterans who died by suicide. About 17 U.S. veterans lose their lives this way each day, on average, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2019, the last year for which records are available, 6,261 veterans took their own lives – and the suicide rate for veterans was 52% higher than for nonveterans, the agency’s records show.
The problem has become so severe that
But that wasn’t available when Dan Miller’s life was unraveling.
In the years leading up to his near-suicide, his wife had pushed him to get help. “She said, ‘You’re not the same person you were when you left. The kids are scared of you. The pets are scared of you,” he recalls.
He resisted, even when his wife threatened divorce. Rising through the ranks of the Marines, Mr. Miller had become more emotionally isolated. He feared losing his job and the respect of others if he let anyone know what he was going through.
Finally, he gave the VHA a chance. He went in for an initial consultation in 2010 and didn’t find it helpful. He didn’t like being told what to do. So he stopped. He turned to obsessive exercise and excessive drinking.
That day in 2014, Mr. Miller’s wife told him she was taking the kids out for a playdate. After she left, he was served with divorce papers. Less than an hour later, he was parked in his car with his gun, ready to end his life.
But if it all had happened just a few years later, things might never have gotten to that point.
Scanning for suicide risk
In 2017, the VHA piloted its AI program, called REACH VET, that aims to help prevent veterans from dying by suicide.
Every month, a computer scans the electronic health records of all VHA patients who’ve had a health care visit for any reason in the last 2 years. It checks more than 140 variables and weights them to estimate someone’s overall suicide risk at that moment in time.
To build the risk algorithm, a computer combed through the medical records of 6,360 veterans confirmed to have died by suicide between 2009 and 2011. (The VHA continually updates the list of variables from the health records of VHA patients, including those who have died by suicide since then and others.)
Some variables are things you’d expect:
- A past suicide attempt.
- A diagnosis of depression or other mental illness.
- A diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Others are more surprising. For example, a diagnosis of arthritis or diabetes adds weight.
REACH VET flags the riskiest cases – the top 0.1% – for a mental health or primary care provider to review. They reach out to the patient to tell them how and why their record was flagged, discuss any recommended treatment changes, and ask them to come in for a visit.
“It’s an opportunity to talk about their risk factors, which is designed to lead to a conversation about safety planning,” says clinical psychologist Matthew Miller, PhD, national director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Suicide Prevention Program. He’s not related to Dan Miller.
Making a suicide safety plan
A safety plan is a document that outlines how a person can help prevent their own suicide in a crisis.
The plan may include:
- A list of personal triggers or warning signs.
- What’s helped them in the past.
- Names of people or organizations who can support them.
- Plans to remove means of suicide, such as guns, from their environment.
- Their reasons for living.
In people at risk for suicide, research shows that having a safety plan reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, lowers rates of depression and hopelessness, and boosts veterans’ engagement with the health care system. It may also help people manage things that trigger their suicidal thoughts.
Getting the call
What if REACH VET had been around when Dan Miller was in crisis – and he’d gotten a call from the VHA?
“It absolutely, positively would have helped because one of the biggest things on that day when I got served was feeling completely alone and that I had no one to turn to,” Mr. Miller says. He’s now a speaker for the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that serves veterans and active-duty service people.
Vets’ reactions to the unexpected VHA phone call, psychologist Dr. Miller says, “run the gamut from ‘Thank you for contacting me. Let’s talk,’ to ‘What are you talking about? Leave me alone!’ ”
Nothing stops all suicides. But REACH VET is having an impact. In a clinical trial, vets contacted through REACH VET had more doctor visits, were more likely to have a written suicide prevention safety plan, and had fewer hospital admissions for mental health, ER visits, and suicide attempts.
An assist from AI
Even simple outreach can make a big difference. And there’s research to prove it.
One study included 4,730 veterans recently discharged from psychiatric care at the VHA, a group considered at high risk for suicide.
Half of them got 13 caring emails from hospital staff in the weeks after leaving the hospital. The emails mentioned personal things the patient had shared, like a love of hiking, and wished them well. The other veterans got routine follow-up but no emails.
Two years later, those who got the caring emails were less likely to have died by suicide than the other vets. The study was published in 2014 in Contemporary Clinical Trials.
Researchers have done studies like this many times: with handwritten notes from the primary care doctor, postcards from the ER, and so forth. The results never vary: The notes reduce suicide risk.
“If we could use AI to identify people to receive notes or phone calls, it would be a very effective and inexpensive way to guide follow-up care,” says Rebecca Bernert, PhD, director and founder of the Suicide Prevention Research Laboratory at Stanford (Calif.) University.
AI doesn’t replace clinical judgment.
“AI can capture data that we miss due to the limits of our humanity,” psychologist Dr. Miller says. “There’s suicide prevention processes founded on big data and AI, and there are processes founded in clinical intuition and acumen.”
AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. If that data lacks diversity, it may miss things. And variables that apply to veterans may differ in civilians.
Stopping suicidal thoughts
Google is putting AI to work against suicide, too. Its MUM (Multitask Unified Model) technology seeks to understand the intent behind what we google.
MUM powers Google Search. It can often tell the difference between a search for information about suicide for someone writing a research paper on the topic and a search for information on how or where to carry out a suicide.
When Google Search detects that someone in the United States might be in crisis and at risk of suicide, the first search results that person gets are the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and other resources for people in crisis.
Google Home Assistant works in the same way. When a user makes a query that signals a suicide-related crisis, the gadget serves up resources that offer help.
MUM is working to understand the nuances of crisis language in 75 languages so that Google Search can provide people in crisis with hotlines or other resources in many countries.
“We want to find partners that are accessible to users in terms of hours of operation. We have a strong preference for finding partners that promise confidentiality and privacy to the extent that those are permitted [in that country],” says Anne Merritt, MD, a product manager at Google Search.
Other companies are working on apps that use AI to spot suicide risk in other ways, including voice technology that may notice subtle changes in the voice of someone who’s depressed and may be thinking of suicide. Those are still in development but show promise. Keep in mind that apps do not require government approval, so if you try one, be sure to let your health care provider know.
Changing the channel
Seeing a hotline number on your phone or computer screen can help, Dan Miller says. “If I happened to be online, searching maybe for a bridge to jump off of ... and suddenly that pops up on the screen, it’s like it changes the channel.”
It may not work for everyone, he says, but that search result could interrupt someone’s suicidal train of thought.
That’s crucial, psychologist Dr. Miller says, because most suicide attempts escalate from first thought to potentially fatal action in just 1 hour. That’s how fast it happened for Dan Miller in 2014.
“When you’re able to put time and space between the suicidal thought and the access to the method to act on that thought, you save lives,” Dr. Bernert says.
Making a different choice
An interruption in Mr. Miller’s thinking is what had saved his life.
Holding the gun to his head, Mr. Miller looked over at the passenger seat at a brochure from Wounded Warrior Project, which he had just learned about. Mr. Miller noticed a photo of a man in a wheelchair, a veteran like him, who had no legs. He thought that the man looked worse off than him but hadn’t given up.
Mr. Miller put down his gun and decided to get help.
Recovering from a near suicide attempt, he says, is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. Now, 8 years later, Mr. Miller is planning a brief break from the speaker circuit. He plans to spend 2 weeks in an outpatient counseling program for posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.
“Telling my story to strangers – part of it is healing me in a way, but I’m learning that repeating the story over and over again is also keeping me from letting it go. And I’m still healing.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.
Is there a cure for aging?
Heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes. Dementia.
Researchers spend billions of dollars every year trying to eradicate these medical scourges.
Yet even if we discover cures to these and all other chronic conditions, it won’t change our ultimate prognosis: death.
“That’s because you haven’t stopped aging,” says Jay Olshansky, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
But what if we could?
Some scientists think so. Fueled in part by a billion dollars of investor money, they are attempting to reverse-engineer your molecular biological clock. Their goal? To eliminate not merely diseases that kill people, but to prevent death itself.
Hacking the code for immortality
Aubrey de Grey, PhD, a biomedical gerontologist, has drawn wide attention for his belief that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old is already among us.
He believes there’s no cap on how long we can live, depending on what medicines we develop in the future.
“The whole idea is that there would not be a limit on how long we can keep people healthy,” Dr. de Grey says. He’s the chief science officer and co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, which funds research on how to put the brakes on aging.
Dr. De Grey’s view, in theory, isn’t so far-fetched.
Scientists have studied the immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii. It’s the only animal that can cheat death by reverting from adulthood back to its polyp stage when threatened with danger or starvation.
Other clues to possible eternal life also may exist underwater. Certain marine clams can live more than 500 years. And lobsters stock a seemingly limitless supply of a youthful enzyme that has some scientists wondering if the crustacean, under the best conditions, just might live forever.
Among humans, researchers have been studying “super-agers” – people who not only live exceptionally long, but also do so without many of the chronic diseases that plague their peers. That’s even though they share some of the same bad habits as everyone else.
“They are making it past the age of 80 with their minds completely intact. That’s what’s so unusual,” Dr. Olshansky says. The rest of their bodies are doing better than those of average 80-year-olds, too.
People who reached ages 95 to 112 got cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and stroke up to 24 years later than those with average lifespans, data show. Figuring out why might pave the way for targeted gene therapy to mimic the DNA of these nonagenarians and centenarians.
“There’s likely to be secrets contained within their genome that are eventually discovered that will help us develop therapeutic interventions to mimic the effects of decelerated aging,” Dr. Olshansky says.
Treating aging this way may offer a bigger payoff than targeting individual diseases. That’s because even if you manage to dodge any illnesses, there’s ultimately no escaping old age.
“Longevity is a side effect of health,” Dr. de Grey says. “If we can keep people healthy, then their likelihood of dying is reduced.”
Aging as a preventable condition
In 2015, Michael Cantor was prescribed metformin for prediabetes. Once that was under control, his doctor said Mr. Cantor could quit the drug. But Mr. Cantor had heard about studies testing it as an anti-aging drug. The 62-year-old Connecticut-based attorney asked if he could stay on it. A year ago Cantor’s wife, Shari, who is mayor of West Hartford, Conn., started to take metformin, too.
“I read the articles, they made a lot of sense to me, and with the number of people that have been taking this drug worldwide for decades, I felt like there was nothing to lose,” he says.
The couple can’t say if their daily doses have led to any changes in how they look or feel. After all, they’re taking the pills not to treat current ailments but to prevent ones in the future.
They may have answers soon. Nir Barzilai, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, is leading a study that hopes to prove aging is a preventable health condition. The TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) study is designed to do this by demonstrating that metformin, a cheap and widely prescribed pill for diabetes, may also be an anti-aging elixir.
The TAME trial is currently in phase III – typically the final step of research into any treatment before drugmakers can apply for FDA approval.
Earlier studies found that people with type 2 diabetes who take metformin have lower death rates from any cause, compared to peers who don’t take the drug. Metformin also seems to help curb the incidence of age-related diseases, including heart disease, dementia, and Alzheimer›s. It also may lower the risk of many types of cancer as well as raise the chances of survival. Observations made since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that people who get the virus while taking metformin are less likely to land in the hospital or die from it.
It’s not clear exactly how metformin works to do all that. The compound was originally derived from Galega officinalis, also known as goat’s rue, a perennial plant used as medicine since medieval times.
Dr. Barzilai says he hopes to prove that aging is a preventable condition.
“If the results are what they think they will be, the whole world could go on metformin and extend life for everybody – extend your good quality of life,” Dr. Barzilai says. “That’s what we all want. Every extra year that we could get where we’re still vigorous and vital would be amazing.”
Long life versus healthy life
Some researchers argue that only the “healthspan” – the period of life free of illness – is worth extending. Of course, a healthy lifestyle can add years to most people’s lives and actually improve cellular aging. Some of the biggest payoffs come from quitting or never smoking, logging more than 5½ hours of physical activity per week, and keeping a normal weight.
Drugs may be able to do that as well by interrupting common markers of aging, including telomere length, inflammation, oxidative stress, and slower cell metabolism.
“You don’t have to target all of these hallmarks to get improvement” in healthspans, says Dr. Barzilai, who also is director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.
“If you target one, you show benefit in the others.”
The medical term for growing old is senescence. Buffeted by DNA damage and stresses, your cells deteriorate and eventually stop multiplying, but don’t die.
That slowdown may have big consequences for your health. Your genes become more likely to get mutations, which can pave the way for cancer. Mitochondria, which produce energy in the cell, struggle to fuel your body. That can damage cells and cause chronic inflammation, which plays a part in diabetes, arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and many other diseases.
One major hallmark of aging is the growing stockpile of these senescent cells. Damaged cells become deactivated as a way to protect your body from harmful or uncontrolled cell division. But like the rotten apple that spoils the whole bunch, senescent cells encourage their neighbors to turn dysfunctional, too. They also emit proteins that trigger inflammation. Your body naturally removes these dormant cells. But older immune systems have a harder time cleaning up, so the senescent cells are more likely to hang around.
Flushing out this accumulated debris may be one way to avert aging, some experts say.
Dr. De Grey also believes that could be done with drugs.
“These therapies would actually repair [cellular] damage,” he says. “They’ll eliminate damage from the body by resetting or turning back the clock.”
James Kirkland, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, is one researcher exploring this theory. He gave a mixture of the cancer drug dasatinib and a plant pigment called quercetin to people with diabetic kidney disease. Quercetin is an antioxidant that gives grapes, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables their flavor.
A small phase I clinical trial showed that the dasatinib-quercetin combination got rid of senescent cells in the tissues of people with the disease.
The researchers don’t know yet if the results will translate into prolonged youth. They also don’t know how high a dosage is needed and what long-term problems the treatment might cause. People with chronic leukemia take dasatinib for years with few serious ill effects.
In another recent study, scientists used oxygen therapy to tackle senescent cells. Thirty-five adults ages 64 and older received oxygen therapy in a pressurized chamber. After 60 daily sessions, they showed a decrease in senescent cells and improvement in the length of DNA segments called telomeres. Shortened segments of telomeres are thought to be another marker of aging.
Researchers are also looking to the gene-editing technology CRISPR for anti-aging treatments, but the testing is only in mice so far.
Dr. Barzilai hopes that if the metformin trial succeeds, it will open the floodgates to a wave of new drugs that can stop or reverse human aging. Some of the major players in this field include Juvenescence, AgeX Therapeutics, LyGenesis, and Life Biosciences, which Dr. Barzilai founded.
“Until aging is seen as preventable, health plans won’t have to pay for this type of treatment,” he says. And if health plans won’t cover aging, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to invest in drug development.
That may be the only thing standing between humans and unprecedented lifespans. The Census Bureau projects that Americans born in 2060 should live an average of 85.6 years, up from 78.7 years in 2018. Dr. De Grey’s prediction tops that mark by a factor of about 50. He believes that the life expectancy for someone born in 2100 may well be 5,000 years.
Dr. Barzilai, for his part, has a prediction that’s seemingly more modest.
“We die at 80. Getting an additional 35 years is relatively low-hanging fruit,” he says. “But I don’t believe that is a fixed limit.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.
Heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes. Dementia.
Researchers spend billions of dollars every year trying to eradicate these medical scourges.
Yet even if we discover cures to these and all other chronic conditions, it won’t change our ultimate prognosis: death.
“That’s because you haven’t stopped aging,” says Jay Olshansky, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
But what if we could?
Some scientists think so. Fueled in part by a billion dollars of investor money, they are attempting to reverse-engineer your molecular biological clock. Their goal? To eliminate not merely diseases that kill people, but to prevent death itself.
Hacking the code for immortality
Aubrey de Grey, PhD, a biomedical gerontologist, has drawn wide attention for his belief that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old is already among us.
He believes there’s no cap on how long we can live, depending on what medicines we develop in the future.
“The whole idea is that there would not be a limit on how long we can keep people healthy,” Dr. de Grey says. He’s the chief science officer and co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, which funds research on how to put the brakes on aging.
Dr. De Grey’s view, in theory, isn’t so far-fetched.
Scientists have studied the immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii. It’s the only animal that can cheat death by reverting from adulthood back to its polyp stage when threatened with danger or starvation.
Other clues to possible eternal life also may exist underwater. Certain marine clams can live more than 500 years. And lobsters stock a seemingly limitless supply of a youthful enzyme that has some scientists wondering if the crustacean, under the best conditions, just might live forever.
Among humans, researchers have been studying “super-agers” – people who not only live exceptionally long, but also do so without many of the chronic diseases that plague their peers. That’s even though they share some of the same bad habits as everyone else.
“They are making it past the age of 80 with their minds completely intact. That’s what’s so unusual,” Dr. Olshansky says. The rest of their bodies are doing better than those of average 80-year-olds, too.
People who reached ages 95 to 112 got cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and stroke up to 24 years later than those with average lifespans, data show. Figuring out why might pave the way for targeted gene therapy to mimic the DNA of these nonagenarians and centenarians.
“There’s likely to be secrets contained within their genome that are eventually discovered that will help us develop therapeutic interventions to mimic the effects of decelerated aging,” Dr. Olshansky says.
Treating aging this way may offer a bigger payoff than targeting individual diseases. That’s because even if you manage to dodge any illnesses, there’s ultimately no escaping old age.
“Longevity is a side effect of health,” Dr. de Grey says. “If we can keep people healthy, then their likelihood of dying is reduced.”
Aging as a preventable condition
In 2015, Michael Cantor was prescribed metformin for prediabetes. Once that was under control, his doctor said Mr. Cantor could quit the drug. But Mr. Cantor had heard about studies testing it as an anti-aging drug. The 62-year-old Connecticut-based attorney asked if he could stay on it. A year ago Cantor’s wife, Shari, who is mayor of West Hartford, Conn., started to take metformin, too.
“I read the articles, they made a lot of sense to me, and with the number of people that have been taking this drug worldwide for decades, I felt like there was nothing to lose,” he says.
The couple can’t say if their daily doses have led to any changes in how they look or feel. After all, they’re taking the pills not to treat current ailments but to prevent ones in the future.
They may have answers soon. Nir Barzilai, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, is leading a study that hopes to prove aging is a preventable health condition. The TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) study is designed to do this by demonstrating that metformin, a cheap and widely prescribed pill for diabetes, may also be an anti-aging elixir.
The TAME trial is currently in phase III – typically the final step of research into any treatment before drugmakers can apply for FDA approval.
Earlier studies found that people with type 2 diabetes who take metformin have lower death rates from any cause, compared to peers who don’t take the drug. Metformin also seems to help curb the incidence of age-related diseases, including heart disease, dementia, and Alzheimer›s. It also may lower the risk of many types of cancer as well as raise the chances of survival. Observations made since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that people who get the virus while taking metformin are less likely to land in the hospital or die from it.
It’s not clear exactly how metformin works to do all that. The compound was originally derived from Galega officinalis, also known as goat’s rue, a perennial plant used as medicine since medieval times.
Dr. Barzilai says he hopes to prove that aging is a preventable condition.
“If the results are what they think they will be, the whole world could go on metformin and extend life for everybody – extend your good quality of life,” Dr. Barzilai says. “That’s what we all want. Every extra year that we could get where we’re still vigorous and vital would be amazing.”
Long life versus healthy life
Some researchers argue that only the “healthspan” – the period of life free of illness – is worth extending. Of course, a healthy lifestyle can add years to most people’s lives and actually improve cellular aging. Some of the biggest payoffs come from quitting or never smoking, logging more than 5½ hours of physical activity per week, and keeping a normal weight.
Drugs may be able to do that as well by interrupting common markers of aging, including telomere length, inflammation, oxidative stress, and slower cell metabolism.
“You don’t have to target all of these hallmarks to get improvement” in healthspans, says Dr. Barzilai, who also is director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.
“If you target one, you show benefit in the others.”
The medical term for growing old is senescence. Buffeted by DNA damage and stresses, your cells deteriorate and eventually stop multiplying, but don’t die.
That slowdown may have big consequences for your health. Your genes become more likely to get mutations, which can pave the way for cancer. Mitochondria, which produce energy in the cell, struggle to fuel your body. That can damage cells and cause chronic inflammation, which plays a part in diabetes, arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and many other diseases.
One major hallmark of aging is the growing stockpile of these senescent cells. Damaged cells become deactivated as a way to protect your body from harmful or uncontrolled cell division. But like the rotten apple that spoils the whole bunch, senescent cells encourage their neighbors to turn dysfunctional, too. They also emit proteins that trigger inflammation. Your body naturally removes these dormant cells. But older immune systems have a harder time cleaning up, so the senescent cells are more likely to hang around.
Flushing out this accumulated debris may be one way to avert aging, some experts say.
Dr. De Grey also believes that could be done with drugs.
“These therapies would actually repair [cellular] damage,” he says. “They’ll eliminate damage from the body by resetting or turning back the clock.”
James Kirkland, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, is one researcher exploring this theory. He gave a mixture of the cancer drug dasatinib and a plant pigment called quercetin to people with diabetic kidney disease. Quercetin is an antioxidant that gives grapes, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables their flavor.
A small phase I clinical trial showed that the dasatinib-quercetin combination got rid of senescent cells in the tissues of people with the disease.
The researchers don’t know yet if the results will translate into prolonged youth. They also don’t know how high a dosage is needed and what long-term problems the treatment might cause. People with chronic leukemia take dasatinib for years with few serious ill effects.
In another recent study, scientists used oxygen therapy to tackle senescent cells. Thirty-five adults ages 64 and older received oxygen therapy in a pressurized chamber. After 60 daily sessions, they showed a decrease in senescent cells and improvement in the length of DNA segments called telomeres. Shortened segments of telomeres are thought to be another marker of aging.
Researchers are also looking to the gene-editing technology CRISPR for anti-aging treatments, but the testing is only in mice so far.
Dr. Barzilai hopes that if the metformin trial succeeds, it will open the floodgates to a wave of new drugs that can stop or reverse human aging. Some of the major players in this field include Juvenescence, AgeX Therapeutics, LyGenesis, and Life Biosciences, which Dr. Barzilai founded.
“Until aging is seen as preventable, health plans won’t have to pay for this type of treatment,” he says. And if health plans won’t cover aging, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to invest in drug development.
That may be the only thing standing between humans and unprecedented lifespans. The Census Bureau projects that Americans born in 2060 should live an average of 85.6 years, up from 78.7 years in 2018. Dr. De Grey’s prediction tops that mark by a factor of about 50. He believes that the life expectancy for someone born in 2100 may well be 5,000 years.
Dr. Barzilai, for his part, has a prediction that’s seemingly more modest.
“We die at 80. Getting an additional 35 years is relatively low-hanging fruit,” he says. “But I don’t believe that is a fixed limit.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.
Heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes. Dementia.
Researchers spend billions of dollars every year trying to eradicate these medical scourges.
Yet even if we discover cures to these and all other chronic conditions, it won’t change our ultimate prognosis: death.
“That’s because you haven’t stopped aging,” says Jay Olshansky, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
But what if we could?
Some scientists think so. Fueled in part by a billion dollars of investor money, they are attempting to reverse-engineer your molecular biological clock. Their goal? To eliminate not merely diseases that kill people, but to prevent death itself.
Hacking the code for immortality
Aubrey de Grey, PhD, a biomedical gerontologist, has drawn wide attention for his belief that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old is already among us.
He believes there’s no cap on how long we can live, depending on what medicines we develop in the future.
“The whole idea is that there would not be a limit on how long we can keep people healthy,” Dr. de Grey says. He’s the chief science officer and co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, which funds research on how to put the brakes on aging.
Dr. De Grey’s view, in theory, isn’t so far-fetched.
Scientists have studied the immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii. It’s the only animal that can cheat death by reverting from adulthood back to its polyp stage when threatened with danger or starvation.
Other clues to possible eternal life also may exist underwater. Certain marine clams can live more than 500 years. And lobsters stock a seemingly limitless supply of a youthful enzyme that has some scientists wondering if the crustacean, under the best conditions, just might live forever.
Among humans, researchers have been studying “super-agers” – people who not only live exceptionally long, but also do so without many of the chronic diseases that plague their peers. That’s even though they share some of the same bad habits as everyone else.
“They are making it past the age of 80 with their minds completely intact. That’s what’s so unusual,” Dr. Olshansky says. The rest of their bodies are doing better than those of average 80-year-olds, too.
People who reached ages 95 to 112 got cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and stroke up to 24 years later than those with average lifespans, data show. Figuring out why might pave the way for targeted gene therapy to mimic the DNA of these nonagenarians and centenarians.
“There’s likely to be secrets contained within their genome that are eventually discovered that will help us develop therapeutic interventions to mimic the effects of decelerated aging,” Dr. Olshansky says.
Treating aging this way may offer a bigger payoff than targeting individual diseases. That’s because even if you manage to dodge any illnesses, there’s ultimately no escaping old age.
“Longevity is a side effect of health,” Dr. de Grey says. “If we can keep people healthy, then their likelihood of dying is reduced.”
Aging as a preventable condition
In 2015, Michael Cantor was prescribed metformin for prediabetes. Once that was under control, his doctor said Mr. Cantor could quit the drug. But Mr. Cantor had heard about studies testing it as an anti-aging drug. The 62-year-old Connecticut-based attorney asked if he could stay on it. A year ago Cantor’s wife, Shari, who is mayor of West Hartford, Conn., started to take metformin, too.
“I read the articles, they made a lot of sense to me, and with the number of people that have been taking this drug worldwide for decades, I felt like there was nothing to lose,” he says.
The couple can’t say if their daily doses have led to any changes in how they look or feel. After all, they’re taking the pills not to treat current ailments but to prevent ones in the future.
They may have answers soon. Nir Barzilai, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, is leading a study that hopes to prove aging is a preventable health condition. The TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) study is designed to do this by demonstrating that metformin, a cheap and widely prescribed pill for diabetes, may also be an anti-aging elixir.
The TAME trial is currently in phase III – typically the final step of research into any treatment before drugmakers can apply for FDA approval.
Earlier studies found that people with type 2 diabetes who take metformin have lower death rates from any cause, compared to peers who don’t take the drug. Metformin also seems to help curb the incidence of age-related diseases, including heart disease, dementia, and Alzheimer›s. It also may lower the risk of many types of cancer as well as raise the chances of survival. Observations made since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that people who get the virus while taking metformin are less likely to land in the hospital or die from it.
It’s not clear exactly how metformin works to do all that. The compound was originally derived from Galega officinalis, also known as goat’s rue, a perennial plant used as medicine since medieval times.
Dr. Barzilai says he hopes to prove that aging is a preventable condition.
“If the results are what they think they will be, the whole world could go on metformin and extend life for everybody – extend your good quality of life,” Dr. Barzilai says. “That’s what we all want. Every extra year that we could get where we’re still vigorous and vital would be amazing.”
Long life versus healthy life
Some researchers argue that only the “healthspan” – the period of life free of illness – is worth extending. Of course, a healthy lifestyle can add years to most people’s lives and actually improve cellular aging. Some of the biggest payoffs come from quitting or never smoking, logging more than 5½ hours of physical activity per week, and keeping a normal weight.
Drugs may be able to do that as well by interrupting common markers of aging, including telomere length, inflammation, oxidative stress, and slower cell metabolism.
“You don’t have to target all of these hallmarks to get improvement” in healthspans, says Dr. Barzilai, who also is director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.
“If you target one, you show benefit in the others.”
The medical term for growing old is senescence. Buffeted by DNA damage and stresses, your cells deteriorate and eventually stop multiplying, but don’t die.
That slowdown may have big consequences for your health. Your genes become more likely to get mutations, which can pave the way for cancer. Mitochondria, which produce energy in the cell, struggle to fuel your body. That can damage cells and cause chronic inflammation, which plays a part in diabetes, arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and many other diseases.
One major hallmark of aging is the growing stockpile of these senescent cells. Damaged cells become deactivated as a way to protect your body from harmful or uncontrolled cell division. But like the rotten apple that spoils the whole bunch, senescent cells encourage their neighbors to turn dysfunctional, too. They also emit proteins that trigger inflammation. Your body naturally removes these dormant cells. But older immune systems have a harder time cleaning up, so the senescent cells are more likely to hang around.
Flushing out this accumulated debris may be one way to avert aging, some experts say.
Dr. De Grey also believes that could be done with drugs.
“These therapies would actually repair [cellular] damage,” he says. “They’ll eliminate damage from the body by resetting or turning back the clock.”
James Kirkland, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, is one researcher exploring this theory. He gave a mixture of the cancer drug dasatinib and a plant pigment called quercetin to people with diabetic kidney disease. Quercetin is an antioxidant that gives grapes, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables their flavor.
A small phase I clinical trial showed that the dasatinib-quercetin combination got rid of senescent cells in the tissues of people with the disease.
The researchers don’t know yet if the results will translate into prolonged youth. They also don’t know how high a dosage is needed and what long-term problems the treatment might cause. People with chronic leukemia take dasatinib for years with few serious ill effects.
In another recent study, scientists used oxygen therapy to tackle senescent cells. Thirty-five adults ages 64 and older received oxygen therapy in a pressurized chamber. After 60 daily sessions, they showed a decrease in senescent cells and improvement in the length of DNA segments called telomeres. Shortened segments of telomeres are thought to be another marker of aging.
Researchers are also looking to the gene-editing technology CRISPR for anti-aging treatments, but the testing is only in mice so far.
Dr. Barzilai hopes that if the metformin trial succeeds, it will open the floodgates to a wave of new drugs that can stop or reverse human aging. Some of the major players in this field include Juvenescence, AgeX Therapeutics, LyGenesis, and Life Biosciences, which Dr. Barzilai founded.
“Until aging is seen as preventable, health plans won’t have to pay for this type of treatment,” he says. And if health plans won’t cover aging, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to invest in drug development.
That may be the only thing standing between humans and unprecedented lifespans. The Census Bureau projects that Americans born in 2060 should live an average of 85.6 years, up from 78.7 years in 2018. Dr. De Grey’s prediction tops that mark by a factor of about 50. He believes that the life expectancy for someone born in 2100 may well be 5,000 years.
Dr. Barzilai, for his part, has a prediction that’s seemingly more modest.
“We die at 80. Getting an additional 35 years is relatively low-hanging fruit,” he says. “But I don’t believe that is a fixed limit.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.