2/1/2016 – Pursuing the Goal of Healthy Aging

In 1980, Dr. James F. Fries, a Stanford University physician who studied chronic disease and aging, proposed that a “compression of morbidity” would enable most people to remain healthy until a certain age, perhaps 85, then die naturally or after only a brief illness.

Now, a group of experts on aging envisions a route to realizing Dr. Fries’s proposal: one or more drugs that can slow the rate of aging and the development of the costly, debilitating chronic ailments that typically accompany it.