With the popularity of biohackers like Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey, the concept of extending our “longevity” has entered the mainstream. And while the extreme methods and self-promotion of some influencers have drawn criticism (Bryan Johnson currently spends ~$2M annually, and Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof diet has been deemed “pseudoscience masquerading as science” by a registered dietician), the concept of “healthy aging” to extend lifespan is emerging as a scientifically measurable and clinically relevant field. Longevity research, also known as “geroscience” is working to understand the underlying causes of aging and identify aging biomarkers, with the goal of extending lifespan.

Unfortunately, despite the dramatic increases in lifespan since the early 1900s, a recent JAMA report found that the global healthspan-lifespan gap (the period in which we are living in poor health in our later years) has widened to 9.6 years, with women having a gap of 2.4 years more, and the US leading with a gap of 12.4 years. Much of this decline in health is due to age-related diseases such as cancer, metabolic disorders, dementia, frailty (due to loss of bone and muscle density) and cardiovascular disease.

These outcomes pose a stark question: What is the point of extending our lifespan if we are in poor health and unable to enjoy those extra years?  For this reason, many clinician scientists are shifting their focus to research on extending healthspan through enhanced early biomarker testing and new treatments to delay or even prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

But “Aging” isn’t considered a disease… yet.

The fundamental challenge in treating the age-related decline stems from the fact that “aging” isn’t seen as a disease. Rather than seeing it as a targetable condition, most doctors see aging as an inevitable biological process that leads to reactive disease management. We have all had our doctors tell us to get more sleep, eat better and get more exercise, but this oversimplified conventional approach lacks the detail, nuance and feedback necessary to drive evidence-based, targeted and truly personalized treatment plans.

A geroscience-informed strategy would shift the paradigm from the current “diagnose and treat” model to a “predict and prevent” approach, integrating data from genetic analysis, advanced screening/imaging and regular biomarker testing to identify and intercept conditions before they manifest into clinically apparent diseases. Importantly, positioning “Healthy Aging” as a true therapeutic target presents a whole set of communication challenges, including a massive communication gap between researchers, clinicians, regulators, and patients, plus addressing the burden of misinformation coming from “health influencers” and social media.

The science is advancing rapidly, but the language, training, and narrative needed to bring Healthy Aging into the clinic are lagging far behind. This represents a fundamental shift away from “sickcare” towards true “healthcare”. For example, in Canada, cardiovascular disease risk is classified via the Framingham Risk Score, and then further stratified into low, medium and high risk, but the groupings are “an arbitrary convenience, not a scientifically validated stratification”. Proactive screenings like coronary calcium scans (which can detect clogged arteries) are not routinely performed in Canada, despite health economics analyses suggesting they are more cost-effective over 10 years than relying only on blanket statin therapy, not to mention the actual health impacts to individuals who would benefit from early intervention.

The Language Challenge: From “Anti-Aging” to “Healthspan”

The first communication hurdle is to create a credible and unified vocabulary. Marketing hype and misinformation have diluted the credibility of the terms “anti-aging” and “longevity”. We need a new lexicon, and medical communicators are on the front lines of defining a vocabulary that positions how “healthspan” and “geroscience” should be used in regulatory submissions, clinical guidelines, and physician education. Regulatory attitudes are slowly shifting:

• The TAME trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin) is leading the way with the first FDA-approved trial to target multiple age-related diseases rather than a single condition, testing metformin in 3,000 people aged 70-80.
• In 2016, age-related loss of skeletal muscle, sarcopenia, was officially classified as a disease by the FDA, establishing a regulatory pathway for age-related conditions and demonstrating how medical terminology can create treatment opportunities.
• The American Medical Association’s landmark decision in 2013 declared obesity a disease state requiring medical intervention and paved the way for new classes of drugs to treat this condition. Even then, it took years of working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to define the parameters and definitions for disease criteria and terminology when running clinical trials, with the FDA only declaring obesity to be a “chronic disease” in 2025.

The success of this new field is going to be heavily dependent on overcoming key communication hurdles, defining terminology and shaping the narrative. Important targets include:

• Effectively communicating the goal of “compressing morbidity” (shortening the time spent in poor health) in a way that regulators will approve, clinicians will adopt and patients will understand.
• Convincing clinicians to shrug off old biases: Many factors of poor health, such as loss of energy, joint pain, muscle wasting (sarcopenia), bone density loss (osteoporosis) and frailty are still considered to be “just a part of getting old”. The paradigm must shift to creating treatment plans that measure and target key healthspan-degrading markers, starting in midlife, well before disease onset.
• Getting private and public drug plans to recognize and cover the costs of preventative care. For emerging healthy-aging therapeutic approaches to work, we need to convince public and private health plans to cover the full spectrum of preventative care. This includes not only proactive treatments but also novel biomarker tests and advanced imaging to guide treatment plans.  For coverage to become a reality, insurers must see a clear long-term economic benefit from disease prevention versus treatment after disease onset. The current system shows how difficult this task is: Even now, with obesity considered a chronic disease with long-term cost impacts to Canadian Healthcare systems, less than 20% of Canadians with private drug plans have coverage for approved weight-loss medications.

The Physician Education Challenge: Training Doctors to Treat “Aging” Itself

Clinicians are trained to diagnose and treat specific diseases, not a complex, multifactorial process like aging. As medical writers we have a monumental task ahead of us to create a new generation of educational materials that shift the medical mindset from reactive disease management to proactive healthspan optimization. How do you convince doctors to integrate new biomarker tests into their practice? Furthermore, how do we demonstrate that these novel biomarkers have real clinical utility, leading to interventions that will improve a patient’s long-term health trajectory?

There will be a growing need for medical education (CME) and training materials that teach physicians how to interpret novel aging biomarkers like DNA methylation/epigenetic and organ “clocks” that can both predict disease risk and measure the impact of interventions. The next generation of CME must train clinicians to be more than diagnosticians – they must be experts in disease interception who can understand healthspan risk factors revealed through specialized blood biomarker panels and genetic data assessments and create personalized treatment plans. Medical writers are uniquely positioned to help deliver on this challenge.

The Patient Motivation Challenge: Making Biomarkers Meaningful

How do you convince a healthy 45-year-old to change their lifestyle or consider a treatment based on an abstract concept like their “epigenetic age“? As reproducible biomarker data becomes more established, we need communication strategies that can translate complex results into clear, compelling, and actionable information for both patients and their physicians. As communicators, we know that data alone doesn’t change behavior. We need to empower patients to manage their “health portfolio” with the same diligence they apply to their financial portfolio: making early and consistent investments in lifestyle and preventative interventions, actively monitoring performance through meaningful metrics, and staying motivated by clear feedback showing their progress on long-term wellness goals.

Translating Science into a New Standard of Care

The science to extend healthspan is rapidly evolving, and it is no longer a question of what is possible in the lab, but how quickly we can build the clinical and communications infrastructure to bring it into the clinic. Patients and practitioners both need tools to help them accomplish meaningful change, and medical writers are practiced in the art and science of simplifying complex data and translating it into plain language for a variety of different audiences. We can turn medical instructions into memorable infographics and transform raw data into visual health summaries and simplified biomarker dashboards that are integrated with treatment plans.

Establishing healthspan extension as a therapeutic area faces its biggest challenge in communications: dismantling outdated mindsets and shifting medicine’s focus from treating the consequences of aging to proactively intervening to reduce the time spent in poor health, thereby optimizing the process of not just living longer but living healthier.