New Paper Forthcoming on Women's Heath and Wellbeing

My latest article titled "Longevity Science and Women’s Health and Wellbeing" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Population Ageing.  

Researching and writing this piece was a true labour of love.  Without realizing it at the time, my interest in this topic was shaped over decades as I first witnessed the demanding caring responsibilities my mother took on to care for her own mother during the last 10+ years of her mother's life.  And then this same dynamic of a period of prolonged management of chronic conditions, coupled with an unequal distribution of the burdens of care, played out for my mother in her final years.  And this predicament is occurring in millions of families around the world as populations survive into late life.  Geroscience can help redress some of these predicaments, because it aspires to improve the quality of life for older persons (vs simply increasing the lifespan by treating single diseases).   

The abstract:

In most areas of the world women comprise the majority of older persons (especially at the most advanced ages), but the additional longevity (globally it is 4.8 years) women have often comes with poorer health status compared to age-matched men.  This article draws attention to four distinct ways an applied gerontological intervention designed to increase the human healthspan via “rate (of ageing) control” could positively impact the health and wellbeing of women in today’s ageing world.  The four benefits examined are: (1) improving women’s health in late life; (2) increasing reproductive longevity and improving maternal health, (3) reducing the financial vulnerability many women experience at advanced ages (especially in the developing world); and (4) reducing the caring burdens which typically fall, at least disproportionately, on daughters to care for their ageing parents.  Highlighting these factors is important as is helps focus geroscience advocacy not only on the potential health dividend age retardation could confer on those in late life, but also the distributional effects on health throughout the lifespan (e.g. improving maternal health) and on helping to ameliorate other important inequalities (e.g. reducing the financial vulnerabilities of late life and easing the burdens on the care givers for ageing parents). By making vivid the benefits “rate (of ageing) control” could confer on women, especially in the developing world, the goal of retarding biological ageing can be rightly construed as a pressing public health priority for the 21^st century.  

Cheers, 

Colin