Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2015 Feb;16(2):137-41.
doi: 10.15252/embr.201439518. Epub 2014 Dec 18.

Living too long: the current focus of medical research on increasing the quantity, rather than the quality, of life is damaging our health and harming the economy

Guy C Brown  1
Affiliations

Living too long: the current focus of medical research on increasing the quantity, rather than the quality, of life is damaging our health and harming the economy

Guy C Brown. EMBO Rep. 2015 Feb.
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Percentage of people in England & Wales 2011 reporting ‘Good health’, or ‘Disability’ in different age ranges (www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_353238.pdf)
Figure 2
Figure 2
Average life expectancy and healthy (disability-free) life expectancy at the age of 65 in the EU25 countries (www.ehemu.eu). The gap between them is the expected years of disability
Figure 3
Figure 3
Longitudinal estimates of cognitive abilities from the Seattle Longitudinal Study indicating decline after 70 years
Figure 4
Figure 4
A managed compression of morbidity Life expectancy is currently increasing more rapidly than healthy life expectancy (average number of years lived in good health), so that morbidity (average number of years lived in poor health) is slowly expanding in the EU. We need to actively compress morbidity by switching medical research funding from causes of death to causes of ageing and age-related morbidity. If successful, this would slow the rate at which life expectancy increased and speed the rate at which healthy life expectancy increased, resulting in a compression of morbidity, which would benefit our health and the economy. When morbidity was sufficiently compressed, resources could be switched back to expand life expectancy.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Oeppen J, Vaupel JW. Broken Limits to Life Expectancy. Science. 2002;296:1029–1031. - PubMed
    1. The 2012 Ageing Report, European Commission.
    1. Xie J, Brayne C, Jagger C, Bond J, Matthews FE. The oldest old in England and Wales: a descriptive analysis based on the MRC Cognitive Function and Ageing study. Age Ageing. 2008;37:396–402. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Brayne C. The elephant in the room- healthy brains in later life, epidemiology and public health. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2007;8:233–239. - PubMed
    1. Brown G. The Living End: The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality. London, UK: Macmillan; 2007.