Everybody at an advanced age and everybody caring for somebody at an advanced age knows that aging matters. Age often takes a severe toll on our mental and physical capabilities and we continue to live for years with an ever decreasing ability to make full use of this one life we got. Life expectancy is close to an all-time high in Switzerland (all-time high in 2019 pre-Covid) but the number of years spent in good health is still 12-15 years less.
| 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 Ideally, this phase of illness which many experience in later life could be compressed into only our very last moments when we would see a sharp drop in health leading to death without unnecessary pain. Before this, we could make full use of the life we are giving be it for being productive, enjoying retirement or, playing with your grandchildren or whatever one might fancy. This is the compression of morbidity concept which is shown as well in the health curve illustration below.
If we want to avoid a long period of disease and reduced capability later in life we need to know what we are fighting. These are first of all chronic diseases, i.e. those that develop over time in contrast to acute diseases such as from infections. Indeed, in Switzerland the leading causes of death are chronic diseases as you will see in the table below.
| 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
All in all, three out of four deaths in Switzerland are due to these four chronic diseases! Now knowing what kills or disables you, you should better know what causes it. The key insight here is that these four kinds of death all have the same most important driver of risk. No, it is not smoking or anything as such. It is age. What this means is that if there was any way to counter the disease-promoting impact of aging, we would in one go address the common and most denominator of our key adversaries. Aging is of systemic importance to all these diseases and addressing it would create huge synergistic benefits for living a healthier life for longer. This is why aging indeed matters to you. A lot.
