The oldest person who lived reached the age of 122. With this, scientists say that the new lifespan of an average human could now be 120. Recently, researchers have reported the possibility of living up to 180 years of age. This will warrant, however, a careful regimen of restricted calorie intake.
Many studies are being conducted to prolong the average human lifespan. There are medicines, supplements, medical procedures, and searches for different cures all in the hopes of extending life. Laboratories across the globe are on a quest to find out why cells age and how to stop it from doing so.
A professor in cardiovascular sciences from King's College London, Mauri Giacca, argues how pointless it is to keep one's body alive while its brain is degenerating. Giacca pointed out how impractical it is to have a healthy body and a low-functioning brain. As the body and the brain ages, certain effects of degeneration manifest in the human body. One of the most common cases where the brain is functioning poorly is when a person undergoes dementia. In Britain, there are around 850,000 people suffering from dementia. By 2025, this number will rise to about a million. There has already been a mountain of effort, time and resources being dedicated to come up with a drug or therapy to reverse dementia. However, setbacks have been rendering these efforts with no promising results and developments.
Studies like the "free radical theory" are still being looked into as more claims of anti-oxidants being able to prevent or delay the aging process surface.
Giacca explains that moving slower when a human grows older is a result of having 10 to 15% of the brain to have died already. A human body typically loses 80,000 neurons per day and there has been no studies on how to regenerate them. At this rate, reaching 80 to 90 years of age could mean a that the human brain has already lost a lot. This also opens the person to the risk of suffering from Alzheimer's disease where neuron loss is accelerated much faster.
If this is the case, then continued attempts to regenerate the body without a solution for a degenerating brain can be compared to a zombie outbreak, like those seen on movies. The bodies are perfect, strong and healthy but the brain does not have the capacity to reason or to think at all.
