The science of healthy ageing coupled with a booming longevity industry is expected to divide society between those living a healthy life beyond 100 and others relying on hospitals merely to keep them alive.
On the first day of the Dubai World Health Expo, panels and talks focused on how society can prepare for more people living longer – and the impact on everyday life.
Medical science is accelerating, with rapid development in longevity research set to make living well into old age more common.
Health care, nutrition, sanitation, disease and environmental conditions all affect life expectancy, which is currently averaging 73 years around the world.
By treating ageing as a disease and planning decades in advance to take preventive measures, more people can expect to live up to three decades longer than they might have previously, experts said.
“Living to 100 seems very imminent, there’s just so much science around this, we could see this in our generation,” said Alisha Moopen, managing director and chief executive of Aster DM Healthcare.
“But you are going to see two ends of the spectrum. You will see people who are living very healthily, are vibrant and full of vitality, and then you will see people really sick who are just staying alive. By taking care of the basics – how we are eating, sleeping or managing stress – we can contribute to a connected ecosystem that is so powerful.”
App tracker
Using the MyAster app, a programme called Thrive Health identifies 100 biomarkers with one test.
It allows clinics and doctors to understand more about a patient’s specific healthcare demands and even how they are likely to respond to certain medicines.
“The triggers for most ill health begin 10 years before, so it's a long game,” said Ms Moopen. “You cannot think about health with short-term gratification, every single decision you make has an impact. How I eat, live and exercise today has far more bearing on what my life will look like 10 years from now than anything else.”
According to the World Health Organisation, a prolonged healthy life in the UAE tends to average at around 66 years, before chronic conditions can start to affect quality of life.
In a talk called Longevity’s Dirty Secret, Reenita Das, former senior vice president of health care and life sciences at Frost & Sullivan consultants, said state-funded biomarker screening at birth would allow health authorities to prepare long-term for population care demands.
Genetic tests at birth would also allow people to take more responsibility for their health, by being aware of what illness and disease were more likely in their lifetime, Ms Das said.
“A citizen of any country should have some biomarker and inflammation screening, it needs to be state-funded and compulsory. Any baby born needs to have this epigenetic screening done in the hospital at birth.
“Abu Dhabi has introduced a programme for its citizens to have compulsory genetic screening for rare diseases but I think it can be done beyond rare diseases. We need to think of it as a wider framework of all diseases and we need to make this compulsory across the world.”
New name, new home
The World Health Expo, formerly known as the Arab Health exhibition, has been rebranded to fit its new home at Expo City.
Hundreds of stands and panels set up by government health authorities and the private sector filled the conference centre for one of the region’s biggest annual health expos.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, who was in attendance on day one, said the event served as an example of his pride in a "homeland that hosts the world".
Longevity was a common theme but how to pay for more people living deeper into old age was also a topic of discussion.
Vikash Sharma is group chief executive of Avisa Smart Hospitals, a company focused on building a large chain of technology-driven hospitals.
“If you look at the economics of health care for the last 20 years, 25 per cent of actual expenditure in any country of the world is spent in the last two to three years of life – on what we call life support,” he said.
“We're supporting someone just to keep on living, keep on breathing, although they might be on machines. If you look at chronic diseases, my forecast is that by 2040, if we don't do something about it, spending on chronic diseases will rise to $47 trillion in the world.”
Mr Sharma said creating a preventive healthcare strategy could be transformative. “We really need to start thinking about this whole area, of how to prevent chronic disease in the first place,” he said.
“By the age of 40, most people develop one or two chronic diseases, and by the age of 70 or 80, they're on 10 medications, maybe on insulin and other things for which costs keep on escalating. Only around 5 per cent of budgets is actually spent on prevention – that needs to change.”
