Fight Aging!

Past studies have demonstrated that the economic cost of aging is enormous. It is not just a matter of the high medical cost of coping with a failing body and a panoply of conditions that cannot presently be cured or even much reversed. The lifetime cost of treating only cardiovascular disease is something like $750,000, for example. There is also the constant destruction of knowledge, capability, and ability to work. There is the opportunity cost of actions that cannot be taken. If everyone in the US gained a year of additional life, if aging was slowed by one year, $38 trillion in economic gains per year would be realized. These are staggering numbers.

In today's open access papers, the authors take a different approach to looking at the value of treating aging as a medical condition. What if every region of the world could adopt the age-related mortality of the best performing region? For each major cause of aging the authors take mortality rates in the best performing region as a benchmark, and consider mortality above this level to be avoidable. Which may or may not be entirely the case, but it is a decent place to start if running the numbers on what an incremental, near future advance in the treatment of aging might look like. As one might expect, the numbers are still very large.

Why do the differences between regions exist? Largely lifestyle choices, and then a layer of socioeconomic status and access to medical technologies on top of that. When it comes to cardiovascular disease risk, the average American is not outperforming the average Bolivian hunter-gatherer, despite the vast disparity in wealth. So strictly speaking, this isn't a discussion about medical technology. Nonetheless, the numbers are interesting in a world in which we may expect the near future introduction of treatments for aging that could have similar effect sizes to exercise, calorie restriction, weight loss, and other lifestyle considerations.

The economic value of reducing avoidable mortality

Living longer and healthier boosts individual and family welfare. As part of the World Bank's Healthy Longevity Initiative, we quantified the economic value of achieving the highest possible life span. We estimated the economic value of reducing avoidable mortality, defined as the difference between observed (or projected) mortality and lowest achieved (or projected) mortality, by world regions, sex, and age, between 2000 and 2021, with projection to 2050.

In 2019, 69% of mortality, or 40 million deaths, was avoidable. The economic value of avoidable mortality globally was 23% of annual income, meaning that, globally, populations would be willing to give up about one-fifth of their current income in exchange for a year living at the lowest achieved mortality rate. This value ranges from 19% in China to 34% in sub-Saharan Africa. Under the rapid-progress scenario, in which countries experience fast but plausible mortality reductions from 2019 to 2050, we would expect globally the gap between projected and frontier life expectancy to be halved by 2050, and the economic value after achieving this scenario is equivalent to 14% of annual income. Our work provides supportive evidence on the high economic value placed on improving health.

The economic value of reducing mortality due to noncommunicable diseases and injuries

With population aging, national health systems face difficult trade-offs in allocating resources. The World Bank launched the Healthy Longevity Initiative to generate evidence for investing in policies that can improve healthy longevity and human capital. As part of this initiative, we quantified the economic value of reducing avoidable mortality from major noncommunicable diseases and injuries. We estimated avoidable mortality - the difference between lowest-achieved mortality frontiers and projected mortality trajectories - for each cause of death, for 2000, 2019 and 2050, and for geographic regions, with high-income countries, India and China considered separately; we applied economic values to these estimates.

The economic value of reducing cardiovascular disease avoidable mortality would be large for both sexes in all regions, reaching 2-8% of annual income in 2019. For cancers, it would be 5-6% of annual income in high-income countries and China, and for injuries, it would be around 5% in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite the large uncertainty surrounding our estimates, we offer economic values for reducing avoidable mortality by cause and metrics comparable to annual incomes, which enable multisectoral priority setting and are relevant for high-level policy discussions around budget and resource allocations.