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GROWING OLDER WITHOUT FEELING OLD

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Professor Rudi Westendorp was trained at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) in the Netherlands, and specialised in intensive care and epidemiology. Later, he focussed on geriatrics and gerontology. In 2000, he was appointed professor of medicine, and, from 2005 to 2012, he was head of the Department of Gerontology and Geriatrics at the LUMC. In 2008, he founded and became the first director of the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, a research institute that provides training, conducts research, and initiates developments in the field of vitality and ageing. In addition, since 2012, he has been director of the VITALITY! programme, part of Medical Delta, an innovative partnership of academic and public institutions, and enterprises, in the south-west of the Netherlands. In 2015, he moved his workplace to Denmark, where he was appointed Professor of Old-Age Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

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Scribe Publications
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

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Originally published in Dutch as Oud worden zonder het te zijn by Atlas Contact in 2014

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scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

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Contents

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AN EXPLOSION OF LIFE1

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AN EXPLOSION OF LIFE1

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1 THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

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An accumulation of damage

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The Leiden 85-plus study

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AN EXPLOSION OF LIFE

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In the previous century, human existence underwent a radical change. There has been an explosion of life — never before have so many people in the developed world lived for so long. It is the most drastic of the changes wrought in our society by the Industrial Revolution. Within a period of about a hundred years, average life expectancy rose from 40 to 80 years, and the likelihood of reaching the age of 65 increased three-fold, from 30 to 90 per cent. Pensioners have also made great gains; rather than ten, they can now look forward to twenty years of leisure when they retire. And then there is Madame Calment, the French lady who reached the grand old age of 122 in 1997. Babies born today can expect to live even longer; there is little doubt that some will live to be 135 years old.

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All these additional years have not come to us because of a change in our bodies — whether by genetic manipulation or any other means. No, our bodies are essentially the same as they always were. Our greatly increased longevity is the emphatic result of the enormous changes we have made to our environment. Unlike before, everyone in the West now has enough to eat, we have clean drinking water available straight from the tap, and many infectious diseases have been eradicated. In addition, the chance of being killed by (military) violence has been reduced to a minimum. So it is no wonder that we no longer die in childhood, and almost everyone reaches old age. Our ability to intervene ever more effectively to counteract the effects of illness or ageing means we are living even longer.

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This book is a ‘satnav’ to help find your way through the life that lies ahead of you. In it, I show how and why human beings have adapted to their surroundings over millions of years. I also tell how our lives have constantly improved — so much so that the structure of our population no longer resembles a pyramid, but a skyscraper. Then, of course, there is the question of what we should do with this long life, now we have been saddled with it. Can we steer it in a particular direction? Everyone says ageing is ‘normal’, that it is ‘usual’, but is that really so? What can we learn from people who live on healthily into extreme old age? Does it help to eat less, or to take hormones, vitamins, minerals? What can we learn from old people who remain full of vitality, despite illness, and infirmity? How do they retain their sense of wellbeing? Of course, I also discuss extensively the social and political implications of this explosion of life.

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1

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THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

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Everything that exists, ages. That’s true of books, beer glasses, washing machines, and people. Ageing, as a process, is the result of an accumulation of minute amounts of damage that we incur simply by being. From a biological and evolutionary point of view, there is no reason for us to get old. It is our early lives that count: when we have the capacity to conceive, bear, and raise children. When that is done, our useful life is over, in the biological sense. Our chronological age, health, and social standing are bound up together by the ageing process. Developments in technology and medicine mean that our biological and chronological age are becoming increasingly disconnected from each other.

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AN ACCUMULATION OF DAMAGE

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ALL FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

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In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

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