About Liz Seegert
Liz Seegert (@lseegert), is AHCJ’s topic editor on aging. Her work has appeared in NextAvenue.com, Journal of Active Aging, Cancer Today, Kaiser Health News, the Connecticut Health I-Team and other outlets. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement at George Washington University and co-produces the HealthCetera podcast.
What happens to quality of life when science actually slows the aging process? That’s what the emerging field of geroscience is all about, according to an interdisciplinary panel of researchers at this year’s Gerontological Society of America Conference. Geroscience tackles biological factors of chronic diseases and aging itself as a risk factor for developing chronic diseases. It has numerous implications for extending healthy life span, enhancing quality of life in later years and impacting public policy surrounding aging and long-term care.
Or, as S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., professor at the school of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago calls it, the Longevity Dividend. “This is a very short way of saying we’re trying to find a way to extend the period of healthy life by going after all the things that go wrong with us as we grow older, which is to go after the biological process of aging itself.” Continue reading →
