Volgograd residents told about the stages of prolonging human life
At the annual forum of the Center for Health Development of the SKOLKOVO School of Management, the director of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Medical Research and Educational Institute, Maria Vorontsova, Candidate of Medical Sciences, offered an ecosystem view on the problem of life extension.
The discussion “SKOLKOVO Health Forum: Living Long is Living Differently” was moderated by Marina Veldanova, professor of business practice, who noted that the era of longevity has already arrived. The key factor, she called not the “unwinding of telomeres”, but the attitude of people to age: a positive attitude, according to large-scale studies, can prolong life by almost 8 years.
According to Vorontsova, the trend for longevity is divided into two stages. The first is the realization of natural biological potential (85-90 years) through a conscious attitude to health and timely medical care. Here “everything new – well-forgotten old”: an integrated approach, medical examination, narrative medicine, work with the patient’s history. The second step is to go beyond the biological potential. Despite huge global investments in the theory of aging, the most proven factors of longevity remain low-calorie diet and high social activity.
The expert defined longevity as an umbrella category that combines practices of increasing healthy life expectancy, preserving functionality and managing age-related changes. The main obstacle is organizational barriers: in the ICD there is no rubric “old age”, so heroprotective drugs are registered mainly as dietary supplements. Vorontsova believes that the driver of the changes is the existential fear of death, which in the next 10-20 years will push health care organizers to find ways to diagnose old age and register such drugs. She proposed a pilot platform for the institute headed by her, where education, science and a university clinic are connected.
