Geroscience: anticipating ageing for a long, healthy life

Forty years ago, geriatrics urgently came into being in the face of an influx of elderly people with multiple conditions into hospitals. This essential sector – from short stays to long-term care nursing homes – remains too focused on dependency, and is therefore too late to be truly effective.

Professor Vellas believes that the priority is now clear: taking preventative steps before dependency arises by identifying the first loss of function and acting immediately.

Ageing can be understood as a staircase, with robust health at the top and dependency at the bottom.  
Our healthcare system often lets people slip step by step to the accident and emergency department, then to hospital stays and finally to nursing homes.

The challenge now is to identify vulnerabilities – related to mobility, memory, nutrition, hearing, vision and psychological well-being – and to protect people’s essential functions so they remain at the top of the stairs for as long as possible. 

After 60, we still have almost 30% of our lives left to live. It’s an opportunity if we stay healthy, but a challenge if dependency progresses. The data shows that 70-year-olds today have the functional capacity of 60-year-olds ten years ago.

Professor Vellas’s goal is ambitious but achievable: making sure that tomorrow’s 80-year-olds are as independent as the 60-year-olds of 10 years ago.

Long considered an unchangeable fact, biological ageing can now be measured and modified. Ongoing work on senescent cells, biological clocks, -omics and artificial intelligence are paving the way for new treatments.  

For example, research on the GDF15 protein, which is involved in frailty and weight loss, offers concrete therapeutic perspectives.

The ICOPE programme, designed with the WHO, is based on a founding idea: healthy ageing does not mean not having a disease, but retaining functional ability so people can keep doing what is important to them.

This definition of healthy ageing, adopted by the WHO, reminds us that prevention must focus on maintaining capabilities – memory, mobility, nutrition, hearing, vision and psychological well-being – rather than just the presence or absence of disease.

The ICOPE Monitor app, which is already being used by more than 130,000 people, helps identify frailties at an early stage, guiding people towards appropriate professionals. Professor Vellas sees it as the best validated method for healthy ageing currently available. 

The new approach, recently approved by the French Académie nationale de médecine, is based on:

• maintaining intrinsic capacity;
• avoiding preventable diseases through vaccination and screening;
• gradually integrating advances in geroscience;
• using digital tools to facilitate personalised monitoring. 

The goal is to make healthy longevity accessible to as many people as possible. 

IHU HealthAge is developing a unique model built around seven pillars, from rolling out ICOPE to using research cohorts, studying the biology of ageing and conducting clinical trials.

Shortlisted for the XPRIZE Longevity prize ($100m), the IHU is now a major international player in the healthy longevity revolution.