Lifespan vs healthspan is an important differentiation where lifespan is the time from birth to death and healthspan is the time from birth to us not being in good health anymore. In the table below lifespan is 85.7 years for women while healthspan is 70.7 years.
| Life years (female / male) | |
| Life expectancy at birth, 2021 | 85.7 / 81.6 |
| Years spent in good health, 2017 | 70.7 / 69.9 |
Table 1: Life expectancy 2021 and years spent in good health 2017 Source: Swiss Statistics Office
While extending lifespan is certainly not unrealistic – we have done it before and impressively so (see type: entry-hyperlink id: DhZwQC3TRYadB5irKiBFf) – the debate seems to be overly focused on how much might be feasible. Is it 122 years as the oldest human on record (although there are some doubts), is it 191 years as in the oldest living animal on world record. Others are debating when we will reach escape velocity, a term coined by Ray Kurzweil to describe the moment when Aging intervention innovation yields per year more than a year worth of additional lifetime.
Frankly, we don`t know and will stay clear of this discussion as what we really care about at Integrail is healthspan. What does it matter to live longer if we can`t do so in good health? This is why for us healthspan comes first and lifespan second.
When it comes to healthspan one additional clarification is of importance: health is not binary which means there are a lot of shades of gray between feeling at your very best with loads of energy and feeling just ok, churning along until ultimately being on the threshold to disease. We believe that focusing on extending healthspan in the longer term is best done by feeling at your best in the short term. This gets you on to the best trajectory for staying healthy into old age and it helps you to stay motivated on the journey. Ultimately, coming back to our health curve and being a bit geeky, we are on a mission to optimize the integral of your health curve (guess where our name derives from…).
