In Western societies people mostly die of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and the resulting co-morbidities.
| Cause of death | Share of common health causes |
| Cardiovascular disease | 34% |
| Cancer | 28% |
| Dementia | 11% |
| Metabolic syndrome | 3% |
| Sum | 76% |
Table 1: Leading causes of death in Switzerland 2022 Source: Swiss Statistics Office
What would now happen if we found a magical cure that would take away these diseases, what would happen to lifespan? This is work that has been done by Olshansky et al., 1990 which estimates this impact for each heart disease or cancer at roughly a 3% increase in median lifespan. This is frankly relatively little.
If instead of taking such a “silo approach“ by attacking each disease on its own we could find a way to attack them all at once, this might indeed hold the potential for a much larger impact on both our lifespan and healthspan. And indeed, as already laid out in a type: entry-hyperlink id: 62WGz2ykOYdZdJCIMR5IsT in more detail the most important risk factor for each of these diseases is actually aging. Targeting aging could thus offer such a common target and synergistic benefit. Indeed even some early data suggests that there is merit to this hypothesis: Rapamycin fed to three independent mouse models yielded a median lifespan increase of 14% in females and 9% in males without change in disease patterns compared to control mice as Harrison et al, 2009. report. This impact is a multiple of the numbers reported above for targeting specific diseases alone. This is obviously only data from mice but still an important indicator of what could be possible, especially as this kind of impact has been replicated with other kind of aging interventions. More on this in a future article on the Interventions Testing Program and its findings.
