For decades now, It is quite well established that from the age of 40 you should start paying more attention to your body. This is when women are supposed to start getting mammograms and men are supposed to start paying a little more attention to their prostate. Over the next decade, you’ll start getting colonoscopies, and from then on it’ll feel like a gradual progression of doctor appointments and tests until your body breaks down at around seventy or eighty.
But what would happen if modern medicine got the timeline wrong? What if we needlessly test some middle-aged people for diseases they will likely never get, while blindly ignoring twenty-somethings who might be prone to colon cancer? Is there a way, even as we age, to stay healthy in a way that is both meaningful and without relying on taking 12 horse-sized pills every morning?
Eric Topol certainly thinks so. The cardiologist, vice president of Scripps Research and author of Super Agers believes that new innovations in AI-assisted medicine, bioengineering and anti-inflammatory drug awareness could potentially revolutionize the way people age.
At WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday, Topol told editor-in-chief Sandra Upson that while he was working on Super Agers he learned that there is a difference between lifespan and healthspan and that neither has much to do with genetics. A “healthy” person, meaning someone over 65 and generally in good health, has roughly the same genetic makeup as someone who is older and facing major health problems, such as heart disease, cancer, or a neurodegenerative disease.
Instead, Topol said, there appears to be a correlation between having a healthy immune system and healthy aging. Lifestyle can also influence your health, with Topol advocating a diet low in ultra-processed foods, focusing on sleep quality rather than sleep quantity, and getting out in nature. He also recommended exercise, focusing on both aerobic work and resistance and balance training, which can help the body become more resilient as you age.
Photography: Annie Noelker
Photography: Annie Noelker
If possible, Topol said, people should avoid environmental stressors, like air pollution, micro- and nanoplastics, and permanent chemicals, all of which Topol said are pro-inflammatory. All of these issues, Topol noted, are not being addressed by President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite their Make America Healthy Again agenda.
For the average American, Topol said, life expectancy is about 63 to 65 years. The lifespan, on the other hand, is around 80 years. This means that most Americans will spend the last 15 years of their lives in relatively poor health, with a World Health Organization statistic indicating that most older adults will only experience one “healthy birthday” after age 65.
“Life span should be extended as close to life span as possible, and I think we can do that,” Topol told Upson. “This is a unique moment in medicine. This is partly because we have multimodal AI, but also because we have new layers of data. We have never had body clocks, which track the aging of every organ in your body, including your immune system. We have never had biomarkers like p-tau217, which tell us about our risk of Alzheimer’s disease 10, 15, or even 20 years in advance The greatest advance in recent biomedicine is the ability to quantify measurements of aging.
