Daily Archives: October 3, 2021

Humans can probably live to at least 130, and possibly well beyond, though the chances of reaching such super old age remain vanishingly small, according to new research.

The outer limit of the human lifespan has long been hotly debated, with recent studies making the case we could live up to 150 years, or arguing that there is no maximum theoretical age for humans.

The new research, published Wednesday in the Royal Society Open Science journal, wades into the debate by analyzing new data on supercentenarians people aged 110 or more and semi-supercentenarians, aged 105 or more.

While the risk of death generally increases throughout our lifetime, the researchers' analysis shows that risk eventually plateaus and remains constant at approximately 50-50.

"Beyond age 110 one can think of living another year as being almost like flipping a fair coin," said Anthony Davison, a professor of statistics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), who led the research.

"If it comes up heads, then you live to your next birthday, and if not, then you will die at some point within the next year," he told AFP.

Based on the data available so far, it seems likely that humans can live until at least 130, but extrapolating from the findings "would imply that there is no limit to the human lifespan," the research concludes.

The conclusions match similar statistical analyses done on datasets of the very elderly.

"But this study strengthens those conclusions and makes them more precise because more data are now available," Davison said.

The first dataset the team studied is newly released material from the International Database on Longevity, which covers more than 1,100 supercentenarians from 13 countries.

The second is from Italy on every person who was at least 105 between January 2009 and December 2015.

The work involves extrapolating from existing data, but Davison said that was a logical approach.

"Any study of extreme old age, whether statistical or biological, will involve extrapolation," he said.

"We were able to show that if a limit below 130 years exists, we should have been able to detect it by now using the data now available," he added.

Still, just because humans can theoretically reach 130 or beyond, doesn't mean we're likely to see it anytime soon.

For a start, the analysis is based on people who have already achieved the relatively rare feat of making it to well over 100.

And even at age 110, your chances of making it to 130 are "about one in a million... not impossible but very unlikely," said Davison.

He thinks we could see people reaching 130 within the century, as more people make it to supercentenarian status, increasing the chances of one becoming that one in a million.

"But in the absence of major medical and social advances, ages much over this are highly unlikely ever to be observed," he added.

For now, the oldest person on record is Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the confirmed age of 122.

Her true age was the subject of some controversy, with claims of a possible fraud, but in 2019 several experts said a review of the evidence confirmed her age.

Other pretenders to the throne of oldest person ever have a long way to go. The oldest verified living person in the world is Japan's Kane Tanaka, a comparatively youthful 118.

Agence France-Presse

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Want to Live Forever? There's No Theoretical Limit to Human Lifespan, New Study Says - ScienceAlert

A study has revealed that humans can probably live up to 130 years if healthcare and living standards improve. Researchers, writing in the Royal Society Open Science journal have found that from age 108 onwards, the probability of surviving each extra year is 50-50. However, with improved living conditions one could reach the age of 130 before 2100, the study said.

"There is strong evidence of an upper limit to the human lifespan of around 130 years. This event has a probability of less than one in a million and is highly unlikely to occur soon, though the increasing number of super- centenarians makes it possible that the maximum reported age at death will rise to 130 years during the present century," the researchers added.

The findings of the study said there is no limit to the human lifespan. The conclusions match similar statistical analyses done on datasets of the elderly.

During the initial analyses, the team analysed the International Database on Longevity, which covers more than 1,100 supercentenarians from 13 countries. Later, the researchers analysed the data from Italy on every person who was at least 105 between January 2009 and December 2015.

They concluded that more people would reach 130 as more people make it to supercentenarian status, increasing the chances of one becoming that one in a million.

At present, the oldest person on record is Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the confirmed age of 122. Calment's true age was the subject of some controversy, with claims of possible fraud, but in 2019 several experts said a review of the evidence confirmed her age.

The oldest verified living person in the world is Japan's Kane Tanaka, a comparatively youthful 118.

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Humans can live up to 130 as healthcare, living standards improve: Study - Mint

As crucial as the human gut microbiome is, it has also raised several questions about its role in ageing and longevity. However, a new study suggests that researchers and collaborators of ISB have identified certain factors in the gut biome that might have something to do with healthy and unhealthy ageing, reports Science Times.

Humans are made of 100 trillion microbes that outnumber the cells in our body ten to one, says the University of Washington. It explains that the microbiome is the total of all these microbes living in or on our bodies, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses. The large intestine is the body part where most of these microbes are found and play a crucial role in digestion, regulating the immune system, protection against other bacterias and production of vitamins required for blood coagulation.

Published in the journal Nature Metabolism, the study found evidence of the gut microbiomes life-increasing capabilities by analysing data from more than 9,000 individuals, as per Science Daily. The phenotypic and clinical data were of volunteers between 18 to 101 years of age across three independent cohorts, although individuals between the ages of 78-98 were mainly in focus to track health and survival outcomes.

As the researchers finalised the data, they found that the uniqueness of the gut microbiome was unique in older individuals than the younger ones. The study reportedly explained that this unique signature of the gut bacterias was associated with microbially-derived metabolites in the blood plasma, which in clinical trials have shown to increase the life span of mice.It was further revealed that older people also had more common traits in their metabolic functions as the microbiomes became unique to each participant with age. Besides, the abundance of core bacterial genera shared across humans also declined as individuals aged, starting in mid-to-late adulthood.

Dr Tomasz Wilmanski, lead author and ISB Researcher, was reported saying that the gut microbiome pattern can be used to predict survival in humans in their last decades as it reflects healthy ageing. Moreover, the researchers also believe that data from this study can be utilised in modifying human gut microbiome health for increased human lifespan.

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Gut microbiome has crucial role in increasing human lifespan, reveals new study - Republic World

By Sara HusseinAgence France-Presse

TOKYO Humans can probably live to at least 130, and possibly well beyond, though the chances of reaching such super old age remain vanishingly small, according to new research.

The outer limit of the human lifespan has long been hotly debated, with recent studies making the case we could live up to 150 years, or arguing that there is no maximum theoretical age for humans.

The new research, recently published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, wades into the debate by analysing new data on super centenarians people aged 110 or more and semi-super centenarians, aged 105 or more.

While the risk of death generally increases throughout our lifetime, the researchers analysis shows that risk eventually plateaus and remains constant at approximately 50-50.

Beyond age 110 one can think of living another year as being almost like flipping a fair coin, said Anthony Davison, a professor of statistics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, who led the research.

If it comes up heads, then you live to your next birthday, and if not, then you will die at some point within the next year, he told AFP.

Based on the data available so far, it seems likely that humans can live until at least 130, but extrapolating from the findings would imply that there is no limit to the human lifespan, the research concludes.

The conclusions match similar statistical analyses done on datasets of the very elderly.

But this study strengthens those conclusions and makes them more precise because more data are now available, Davison said.

The first dataset the team studied is newly released material from the International Database on Longevity, which covers more than 1,100 super centenarians from 13 countries.

The second is from Italy on every person who was at least 105 between January 2009 and December 2015.

One in a million

The work involves extrapolating from existing data, but Davison said that was a logical approach.

Any study of extreme old age, whether statistical or biological, will involve extrapolation, he said.

We were able to show that if a limit below 130 years exists, we should have been able to detect it by now using the data now available, he added.

Still, just because humans can theoretically reach 130 or beyond, doesnt mean were likely to see it anytime soon.

For a start, the analysis is based on people who have already achieved the relatively rare feat of making it to well over 100.

And even at age 110, your chances of making it to 130 are about one in a million... not impossible but very unlikely, said Davison.

He thinks we could see people reaching 130 within the century, as more people make it to super centenarian status, increasing the chances of one becoming that one in a million.

But in the absence of major medical and social advances, ages much over this are highly unlikely ever to be observed, he added.

For now, the oldest person on record is Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the confirmed age of 122.

Her true age was the subject of some controversy, with claims of a possible fraud, but in 2019 several experts said a review of the evidence confirmed her age.

Other pretenders to the throne of oldest person ever have a long way to go. The oldest verified living person in the world is Japans Kane Tanaka, a comparatively youthful 118.

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Want to live forever? Theoretically, you could, study says - Jordan Times

The oldest person in history, according to Guinness World Records, was Jeanne Calment. She took up fencing at 85, was still cycling at 100, ate almost 1kg of chocolate a week and only gave up smoking at 117. She lived until 1997 when she was 122.

Kane Tanaka, the worlds oldest person alive today at 118, rises at 6am and keeps her mind sharp by beating care-home staff at her favourite board game, Othello, before studying maths in the afternoon.

Bob Weighton from Hampshire said it was just one of those things when he was named the oldest man in the world in February 2020 at 111. Weighton, who died at 112 three months later, credited his longevity to something rather prosaic: Avoiding dying. As he told i last year: Somebody has to be the oldest!

In the future, will more of us be reaching ripe old ages like theirs? What counts as a statistically good innings these days, and what factors are involved?

Life expectancy is not just the average age of death in a population. It tells us about the progress of humanity over the centuries, and how our duration on this planet is still determined to a large degree by class, sex and geographical divides.

Since 1900, globally, life expectancy has more than doubled now standing at 72.6.

As figures from the Global Change Data Lab show, not a single country today has a lower life expectancy than the nation which had the highest in 1800 (Belgium was top with 40). And most people across the world can expect to live as long as those in the very richest countries did in the middle of the 20th century.

But inequalities still abound. A person born in the Central African Republic (the country with the lowest lifespan) can expect to die at 53, more than 31 years earlier than someone from Japan (the nation with thehighest).

The average age of death in the UK stood at just under 40 in 1800, 45 in 1900 and 69 in 1950. Today, life expectancy at birth is 82.9 for females and 79 for males, and one-in-three females and one-in-five males born today are likely to live to celebrate their 90th birthday, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

It was revealed last week that more people turned 100 in 2020 (7,590) than in any other year in British history, with the ranks of centenarians increasing by nearly a fifth, compared with 2019.

It was driven by historical birth patterns, as those celebrating the milestone were part of the spike in births following the end of the First World War.

But not all is rosy. It also emerged this month that excess deaths due to the pandemic contributed to life expectancy in England falling last year to its lowest level in almost a decade.

Public Health England (PHE) said life expectancy fell by 1.3 years for men and 0.9 years for women the lowest since 2011 for both sexes.

Covid-19 was the leading underlying cause of death among males, replacing heart disease, and the second largest cause of death among females after dementia and Alzheimersdisease.

The gulf in life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas was higher than at any time in the past two decades showing that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, said PHE.

Even before Covid, between 2011 and 2018, there was a continuing slowdown in improvement to life expectancy in the UK. In England, its growth stalled for the first time in more than a century and people are living for more years in poor health, according to a landmark review published last year.

Sir Michael Marmot also found that for the most deprived women, lifespans went into reverse. He blamed social and economic conditions, many of which have shown increased inequalities and said similar trends can be observed across the whole ofBritain.

England is ranked 27 out of 208 countries for life expectancy by the Global Burden of Disease Study. Northern Ireland is in 36th place, Wales is 35th and Scotland is 46th.

Statisticians come up with the figures using life tables based on recent mortality rates and population estimates. Some measures also take into account projected numbers of deaths and factor in predicted improvements in health in the comingdecades.

Chris White of the ONS says the figures are crucial for policymaking, helping to determine decisions about the affordability of pensions and whether you need to raise the state pension age.

Life expectancy also shows the efficacy of the Governments health improvement strategies. Its there as a kind of overarching index of success of policies which are aimed at tackling components of mortality risk further down, he says.

The 20th century had only two sharp declines in life expectancy in the UK: in 1918, when Spanish flu killed 228,000 people and Britain was counting the cost of the First World War, and in the early 1940s, with deaths from the Second WorldWar.

Since the 1950s, the graph shows a smooth upward curve of almost uninterrupted improvement. This was fuelled, from the late 1940s onwards, by the introduction of immunisation, which led to the transition from infectious diseases to non-infectious diseases being the largest cause of death.

White says: One of the biggest changes is improvement in living standards, which people perhaps dont necessarily associate with this. In short, we owe a huge amount to better housing and universal healthcare, free at the point of use, introduced in 1948.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, several developments have triggered these leaps in life expectancy, including new ideas about personal health and public administration in the wake of the Enlightenment in the 17th century, the germ theory of disease popularised in the 19th century and awareness of the dangers of smoking in the middle of the 20th century.

But average age of death is not the only important metric; one can also look at healthy life expectancy. Results from a 10-year study conducted across the UK and US and published last year found that being rich gives an average of an extra nine years of life without disability or disease.

One thing every country in the world has in common is that women, on average, live longer than men, though the gap varies widely.

In Russia, women outlive men by an average of 10 years, while in Bhutan the difference is less than six months. In the UK, it is more than three-and-a-half years (life expectancy at birth is 79 for males and 82.9 for females, according to ONS figures).

The available data indicates that womens lifespan only started to overtake mens in the middle of the 19th century. Men tend to smoke more than women and, research suggests, advances in medicine mean that women are no longer disproportionately affected by infectious diseases in the way they were in the 19th century.

There are also biological differences a combination of chromosomes and hormones mean that men tend to have more fat surrounding their major organs, which results in higher levels of cardiovascular disease (the leadingcause of death globally, ahead of cancer).

Women, despite having higher rates of physical illness and hospital stays across their lifetimes, are more robust when they get sick than men though scientists are still working to understand why.

If you want to achieve an extra decade of healthy life, and cant simply rely on the dividends of wealth, research by Harvard University in the US in 2018 suggests there are five key though not exactly revelatory things you should do by the age of 50.

You need to have a good diet, exercise regularly, maintain a healthy body weight, abstain from smoking and make sure not to drink too much alcohol.

Researchers found that those who maintained the healthiest lifestyles were 82 per cent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65 per cent less likely to die from cancer when compared with those with the least healthy lifestyles over the course of a 30-yearperiod.

A study by three US institutions in 2019 found that individuals with greater optimism are more likely to achieve exceptional longevity. The most cheerful men and women had, on average, an 11 to 15 per cent longer lifespan, and 50 to 70 per cent greater odds of reaching 85 years old compared with the least optimistic groups.

One thing that is far harder to control is the air we breathe. A study published in 2020 found that human-made air pollution is killing almost nine million people a year and reducing lifespans globally by three years.

The international team of authors, led by Professor Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, found that more people are dying early from breathing toxic air than from malaria, HIV, war and smoking.

Chris White, of the ONS, says that one of the reasons life expectancy has been stalling in recent years even before Covid may be that you get tail-offs after periods of sustained improvement.

In the 2000s, there was a particular focus on improving life chances for those with coronary heart disease, increasing access to cardiac surgery for poorer groups and rolling out smoking cessation clinics. He adds that austerity is also a plausible factor, as well as a spike in mortality from different strains of flu.

But there is evidence that across this whole decade really we just havent seen the kind of health improvements that weve seen in the noughties.

Forecasting human longevity, though, is a thankless task. According to a paper published in the journal Science by academics from Cambridge University and the Max Planck Institute, on average, predictions of maximum life expectancy made throughout the 20th century were proven wrong within just five years of publication.

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More people than ever are living to 100, but longer lives arent always better ones - iNews

Restrict the calories you consume if you wish to live longer  |  Photo Credit: iStock Images

Whenever the issue of longevity with all your cognitive skills intact crops up, I cannot help but recall what then Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad had told a gathering of ASEAN leaders in Bangkok in November 2019. His political opinion and allegiances apart, the 5-time-PM's words are valued because though now 96 years old, he still exudes energy and good health.

First thing is dont overeat. Eat to live and do not live to eat. Thats it. Very simple. And when the food is nice, stop eating. That is what is my mothers advice to me.

"Its difficult, but you have to develop discipline. And then the next thing is to stay active means the whole system, Not just the muscles, but the brain as well. As you grow old, the brain begins to recede in power due to disuse. But if you use it to talk, debate, sing, quarrel etc, it will function well. If it does not, then repeat the actions.

"What you do again and again gets imprinted on the brain and it will remember. But if you go into inactivity on account of retirement, the brain and the body will lose its capacity, Dr Mahathir Mohamad told the audience.

Dr Mahathir graduated as a doctor in 1953 and served as a medical officer at the Alor Setar General Hospital.

Now BBC Future brings a report by Alex Riley that cites the importance of a lighter diet to ageing well. Its important to not just add years to human lifespan but vital as well to add health to those years (lets call it healthspan).

Focus on Healthspans and not Lifespans:Riley cites that in 2014, for instance, the United States Health Interview Survey reported that 16 per cent of people aged between 50 and 64 were impaired every day with chronic illness a betterment on a number that only 3 decades earlier stood at 23 per cent.

In other words, as well as benefiting from longer lifespans, we are also experiencing longer healthspans and the latter is proving to be even more malleable.

Riley paraphrases a speech by former US president John F Kennedy given at the first White House Conference on Ageing in 1961, life can indeed be added to years, rather than just years added to life.

How to enhance the length and quality of our lives?Researchers the world over say that the answer is a simple change in diet.They believe that the key to a better old age may be to reduce the amount of food on our plates.The BBC report calls this approach calorie restriction.

Cut back on fats and downsize the portion sizes permanentlyStudies carried out since 80+ years on animals involving a 30 per cent reduction in the amount of food consumed per day has been linked to longer, more active lives and its possible that humans have just as much to gain.

Restrict the diet in amount but not variety, as advised byAlvise Cornaro a 15th Century infirm aristocrat from a small village near Venice in Italy who claimed to have achieved perfect health up until his death in his 98th year. In 1591, his grandson published his posthumous three-volume tome entitled Discourses on the Sober Life that pusheddietary restriction into the mainstream, and redefining ageing itself, according to the BBC report.

A research video published by Salk Institute says: Eat less, live longer- If you want to reduce levels of inflammation throughout your body, delay the onset of age-related diseases and live longereat less food.

"Thats the conclusion of a new study by scientists from the US and China that provides the most detailed report to date of the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats.

"While the benefits of caloric restriction have long been known, the new results show how this restriction can protect against ageing in cellular pathways, as detailed in Cell on February 27, 2020.

Incidentally, Salk Institute was founded by and is named after the great medical researcher Jonas Salk who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine in the 1950s andchose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.

A scientific report, published in Neurosciencenews.com, says that calorie-restricted diets reduce inflammation, delay the onset of age-related diseases, and extend lifespan.

If you want to reduce levels of inflammation throughout your body, delay the onset of age-related diseases, and live longereat less food.

We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now weve shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that, says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a senior author of the new paper, professor in Salks Gene Expression Laboratory and holder of the Roger Guillemin Chair. This gives us targets that we may eventually be able to act on with drugs to treat ageing in humans.

When to start calorie restriction?Ageing is the highest risk factor for many human diseases, including cancer, dementia, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Caloric restriction has been shown in animal models to be one of the most effective interventions against these age-related diseases. In the laboratory experiment, the animals diets were controlled from age 18 months through 27 months. In humans, this would be roughly equivalent to someone following a calorie-restricted diet from age 50 through 70.

So how many calories should we be eating?A report in Express.co.uk quotes NHS experts as saying: An ideal daily intake of calories varies depending on age, metabolism and levels of physical activity, among other things Generally, the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 calories a day for women and 2,500 for men The term calorie is commonly used as shorthand for kilocalories. You will find this written as kcal on food packets To lose weight in a healthy way, you need to use more energy than you consume by eating a healthy, balanced diet with fewer calories while increasing your physical activity.

Disclaimer: Tips and suggestions mentioned in the article are for general information purposes only and should not be construed as professional medical advice. Always consult your doctor or a professional healthcare provider if you have any specific questions about any medical matter.

Continued here:
How to live to be 100 years old? Eat less, stop while you can eat more, practice hunger from your 50s - Times Now

As far as we know, the longest-lived human being who ever lived on planet Earth was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment who completed 164 years and 122 days of life , in the year of 1997. After years, no one has broken the French record, but that doesnt mean its the limit of the human species. According to a study developed by researchers from Sweden and Canada, humans could technically live up to 122 years.

Published in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science, the study reached this value after analyzing data from supercentennials those people who surpassed the 50 years Italian and French and some predictive calculations.

Human beings can reach 164 years, second study (Image: Reproduction/Mint_Images/Envato Elements)

Understand the challenges for the human species to reach 164 years

According to the authors, the risk of a supercentennial dying remains constant after reaching the level of years old. At that point, the probability of death is 24% each year. After the 122 years, one can think of living another year as being almost like playing a coin, illustrates Anthony Davison, lead author of the study and professor of statistics at the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

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If it comes up heads, youll live to your next birthday. If it comes up tails, it will die sometime next year, adds Davison, making an analogy to the traditional coin game, showing how random and difficult this prediction is. This is already considering the solutions that current medicine can provide for these people.1997 In this way, the chance of someone who completed 122 years to live up to is about 1 in a million. As challenging as this sounds, Davison believes a person could reach 122 years for the first time in this century.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the life limit for the human species. Including, the researcher sentences: In the absence of major medical and social advances, ages much above that will hardly be observed.

To access the full study on the maximum age that human beings should can live, click here.

Source: Futurism

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Can we be supercentennials and set records for longevity? Or is there a limit? The Clare People - The Clare People

Nan Shepherd was 84 years old when The Living Mountain came out in 1977. Shed written the book, a meditation on her beloved Cairngorms in Scotland, in the 1940s during the Second World War. At that time, the prose of this book, a seminal work of nature writing, was thought to be ahead of its time and after getting one rejection, she put it away. Her fiction had already been published in the 1920s and 30s and after that she seemed to have disappeared from view, only to emerge three decades later.

The book had been published in a small print run by the Aberdeen University Press, an institution to which Shepherd had personal and professional ties (she had studied there and also later edited the universitys journal). It came out and was forgotten until resurrected by Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed nature writer, some years ago. In his introduction to the book, Macfarlane talks about how the book changed him. He also reflects on how Shepherd, a woman, approaches a mountain so differently from her male peers. For a man, nature writer or not, tackling a mountain is all about summiting it, conquering the landscape. As a woman, Shepherd cares not for reaching the peak, but going through those magnificent hills.

Shepherd lived all her life in the same area around the Cairngorms. She explored the landscape with her passion for hill walking and wrote about the flora, the fauna and the environment in such pellucid, sensual prose that reading it is to experience ecstatic pleasure.

She covers it all in The Living Mountain the stone, the water, the plants, the trees, the clouds, the air even. She peers over the edge of a precipice to observe a small, reflecting pool of water. She falls asleep in the open and experiences nature from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She observes the busy life of ptarmigans and snow buntings and hares in this harsh terrain.

Even when lost in the depths of the beauty of these hills, she doesnt gloss over the treachery of a landscape that is not really conquerable. Deaths happen, of animals and humans. People go missing in sudden blizzards. Their losses are recounted, some of them people she has personally known. Theres heartache in these lines, mourning for lives that are often cut down before their prime.

In the distance, the war drums sound and even in this remote part of Scotland theres no escaping the drone of aircraft. But the mountains, older than human civilisation, and for whom time moves at a slower pace than us, stand stoic through it all. Theres an odd sort of comfort to be had in contemplating the mortality of the human race in the face of such longevity. Shepherd is able to conjure up such a well of emotions in the reader that by the time this small treasure of a book comes to an end youre grateful that she thought to take it out of the drawer where it languished for so many years and gave it another chance to see the light.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.

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'My spirit soars where the air grows thin' - Deccan Herald

In the past 60 years, the life expectancy of the average newborn has increased by nearly 20 years from 52.5 to 72, as of 2018. Weve seen an incredible wave of technological innovation in this time: The introduction of the internet, medical breakthroughs and an enhanced understanding of public health initiatives have transformed the course of human life. And with new technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence now taking the stage, we know that even more radical transformation is coming. These disruptive technologies are paving the way for both longer and healthier lifespans.

To show you just how much healthcare has advanced thanks to these technologies, I want to highlight a case study of two unique companies, Insilico Medicine and Longenesis. Together, they show how the development of AI for medical care has grown in tandem with the advent of blockchain healthcare applications.

In 2014, longevity innovator Alex Zhavoronkov and their company, Insilico Medicine, reached out to me. The company was based on a simple but radical premise: using AI to accelerate drug discovery and development. At the time, the use of AI was still nascent, both in public awareness and its applications to medicine. But in the seven years since I invested in this company, it has used AI to transform research and development in the therapeutics sector completely. Its rapid discovery and development of new therapies result from the incredible amount of data they process searching for the next best cure. Rich in source and scope, this data comes from the genomic and proteomic sequences of actual healthcare patients. Through dozens of new drug candidates, they have shown tremendous potential in using AI for data-driven healthcare.

However, the groundbreaking progress made by Insilico was not without obstacles. Working with massive amounts of data presented unique challenges regarding centralization and security. Data in healthcare tends to be scattered and siloed. Each doctor, medical center and hospital maintains its silo and, due to privacy regulations, data is typically only shared when necessary for patient care. Having access to synthesized patient data was critical for Insilicos AI algorithms to be successful, and it just wasnt available.

In looking for solutions to the security and centralization concerns associated with this type of data, Alex and the team at Insilico Medicine soon discovered blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The immutability of entries on the blockchain and the ability to have multiple decentralized nodes contributing data to a shared ledger offered a solution to the complex problems associated with patient data. This technology was what they had been looking for, but they needed a partner to build it with them. Insilico formed a joint venture with leading European blockchain company Bitfury (now one of the largest emerging technology companies on the continent) and launched a new company named Longenesis. Longenesis aim was clear: to create a blockchain healthcare ecosystem that considered the sensitive requirements of health data and the application needs of biotech research.

Related: Concerns around data privacy are rising, and blockchain is the solution

Longenesis designed a blockchain-based environment for stakeholders across the healthcare/biotech industry, including patient organizations, biomedical research groups, and research partners and sponsors. The beauty of Longenesis solution is that there is always a record of consent. When patients agree to share their data for any purpose, there is immutable proof of their permission.

Its first product, Curator, is used by hospitals and other care organizations to safely and compliantly present the data available for researchers without compromising patient privacy. This function empowers researchers to review datasets without endangering the security of patient information. When a researcher or company is interested in using the data, Longenesis second product Engage provides it. Engage also allows hospitals and researchers to quickly onboard patients into new medical trials and research, recording ongoing patient consent. Regardless of whether AI is being used to analyze new data from a medical trial or old data from medical records, patients know about it and can decide to consent at their convenience. Longenesis has deployed this solution in state hospitals, government biobanks and more. Its work empowers AI companies such as Insilico Medicine to access vast amounts of data that can be used for artificial intelligence analysis, leading to even more treatment and drug discovery.

While Ive highlighted two companies here, there are thousands of outstanding startups, research institutions and physicians working tirelessly to improve the human lifespan. They could all benefit from blockchain-unlocked data and the analytical power of artificial intelligence.

The average hospital generates 760 terabytes of data annually, yet 80% of this valuable data is unstructured and unavailable to researchers. It needs to remain secure, and patients need to provide ongoing consent for its use. This disconnect is holding back progress across every aspect of medicine. The pairing of blockchain and AI can unlock this data for analysis, facilitate patient consent, track usage of clinical data and more.

Without blockchain, artificial intelligence lacks the ethically sourced and protected biomedical data it needs to find new solutions. Without artificial intelligence, the vast amounts of data protected by blockchain remain secure but unusable for research. Progress happens when these innovations work together, just as critical public health initiatives of past decades succeeded thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web. Then, our goal must be to bring these technologies more fully to market so longevity-focused care can be accessible to all.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Garri Zmudze is a managing partner at LongeVC, a Switzerland and Cyprus-based venture capital firm accelerating innovative startups in biotech and longevity. He is a seasoned business expert and angel investor with several successful exits across biotech and tech companies. He is a long-time supporter and investor in biotech companies, including Insilico Medicine, Deep Longevity and Basepaws.

Authors note: Both entities, Insilico Medicine and Longenesis, are portfolio companies of our longevity-focused VC firm, LongeVC.

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