Through the majority of human history most humans died long before they had lived long enough to suffer from age-related disease.  Thankfully, basic scientific advances have eliminated, for much of the developed and developing world, those causes of death which people died from over a century ago and limited life spans to about 40 years.  Now however we have the consequent problem resulting from that success in that most individuals now live long enough to suffer and die from degenerative disease at older ages, often after long periods of dependency and debilitation.  There are however some lucky few who escape the worst of these diseases who survive in good health and maintain their independence into their 9^th decade and further and continue to contribute to their communities as their contemporaries succumb to one age-related disease or another.   Despite the universal desire to live as healthy as possible as long as possible, the resource this group represents for information on healthy aging has not received the attention it deserves.

LifeStar Institute would like to announce a major initiative taken on by one of our Advisors to discover ways to maximize healthy longevity and maintain function and independence in old age.  Nir Barzilai, M.D of Albert Einstein College of Medicine has been at the forefront in determining how the “oldest old” manage to escape many of the degenerative diseases which affect and often kill those many years younger.   Dr. Barzilai’s work is highlighted in the launch of the new website SuperAgers.com sponsored by Albert Einstein College of Medicine which features the latest discoveries emerging from a milestone study looking for genes that determine healthy longevity.   Such discoveries are important and may be instrumental in developing methods of maximizing health in a globally aging population.

We hope you will visit SuperAgers.com and share this news with your networks.   The results of this work are important and you can help others understand the current state of the science and the near-term prospects for useful interventions for degenerative disease in already mature individuals that this work represents.