What causes us to die when we are old?

Curing age-related diseases and prolonging life?

Age-related diseases are the main reason why we die. In Germany, for example, a total of 1,066,341 people died in 2022. More than a third of these (33.6% or 358,219 people) died from cardiovascular disease. A further 22.5% (or 239,948 people) died of cancer, while 5.0% of deaths (53,323 people) were the result of dementia. In total, 851,655 people died from old-age diseases, which corresponds to 79.9% of all deaths registered that year.

Let's assume that we could completely cure cardiovascular diseases, which kill more than one in three people. Shouldn't life expectancy increase significantly as a result? Surprisingly, this is not the case - we would only gain an additional 2 years. If we could cure cancer completely, we would gain another 3 years. Both diseases together account for more than half of all deaths, and yet curing them would only give us 5 more years of life. Why is that?

We often suffer from many diseases in old age

The reason is because most people would die of another age-related disease within only a relatively short time. From the age of 65, every second person suffers from two or more age-related diseases. Around half of all people over the age of 70 suffer from multimorbidity, i.e. have at least three different chronic diseases at the same time. So what really kills us in old age is ageing itself and the age-related diseases it triggers. 

However, a few people are spared these diseases and age healthily. One of the aims of our research is to understand how they manage to do this.

Until now, we have treated age-related diseases individually, i.e. cardiologists treat heart disease, oncologists treat cancer and neurologists treat dementia. However, only a handful of molecular processes lead to the development of all age-related diseases. We could therefore prevent the development of several diseases at once by understanding these processes and learning how to influence them. Instead of treating age-related diseases as a consequence of ageing, we could prevent multimorbidity and promote healthy ageing.