By 2050, there will be almost 120 million people aged 80 years or older living in China alone, 434 million are expected to reach this age worldwide by the middle of the century.
Recognizing the growing demand for treatments, research into geriatric health conditions has surged in recent years.
Biotechnologies are revolutionizing our management of aging populations by offering regenerative and genetic interventions that heal illnesses by restoring malfunctioning cells, tissues and organs.
Digital technologies and smart devices are already monitoring the health status of people of all ages, the world over.
Today, for the first time in history, most people in the world can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. Globally, 125 million people are aged 80 years or older. By 2050, there will be almost this many (120 million) living in China alone, and 434 million people aged 80 years or older are expected to live worldwide by the middle of the century. China’s latest five-year plan, for which the ‘Two Sessions’ meeting was held on 4th March 2021, acknowledged the problem, building on the previous year’s announcement that the number of citizens aged 60 or over accounted for 18.1% of the Chinese population in 2020. As that number is expected to grow, policies aimed at boosting fertility and rebalancing the population are being initiated.
“More inclusive population policies will be introduced to improve fertility, the quality of the workforce and the structure of the population,” said Yuan Xin, Vice President of the China Population Association.
Maintaining Health and Independence
All being well, children born today should live well into their 80s, giving them precious extra years to pursue new activities, spend time with their families, and hopefully contribute to the societies in which they live. The extent of those opportunities and contributions depends heavily on them maintaining their health and independence but, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), at the moment there is little evidence to suggest that older people are experiencing better health in their later years, compared with previous generations. In other words, we may be keeping people alive for longer, but at the moment we’re not necessarily giving them a life that is as enjoyable as we might hope.
This has driven healthcare systems across the globe to develop policies aimed toward healthier aging. As the adage goes, prevention really is better than cure. Common conditions in older age include:
Hearing and sight problems
Back and neck pain
Osteoarthritis
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Diabetes
And a range of geriatric syndromes such as frailty, urinary incontinence, and a heightened risk of fall.
Preventing or delaying these chronic debilitating conditions would go a long way towards keeping us healthy, and could also save health authorities considerable costs in terms of medications and care.
Breakthroughs in Geriatric Health
Recognising the growing demand for treatments, research into many of these conditions has surged in recent years. For example,
Osteoporosis
Pfizer and Eli Lilly’s tanezumab, a new monoclonal antibody against nerve growth factor, is currently under review by the FDA as a treatment for pain in osteoporosis patients. Possibly even more exciting, however, in the first two months of 2021, were the recent FDA approvals for Signature Biologics to proceed with a study of human umbilical cord tissue allografts in osteoarthritis patients, and for Histogen to proceed with a clinical trial of human extracellular matrix to regenerate hyaline cartilage. If successful, products such as these would be the first to repair the tissue damage caused to osteoarthritis, rather than simply managing the pain.
Diabetes
Similarly, researchers have made great advances in diabetes care in recent years. In 2019, a new artificial pancreas system was approved by the FDA, along with an immunotherapy treatment called teplizumabab that delays type 1 diabetes.
In the same year, it was discovered that a nu...
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