Do we want a future where 10 year olds pop statins to stay healthy?
13 March 2012
At this year’s Oxford London Lecture, Oxford University gerontologist Professor Sarah Harper will talk about the implications of a falling birth rate coupled with rising longevity – a phenomenon affecting most countries across the globe.
Speaking at the public lecture, entitled ‘The 21st Century – the last century of youth?’, Professor Harper, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, will refer to UN estimates showing the proportion of children per population in most countries is likely to fall to 15% or below by the end of this century. It could even dip to that level by 2050 in some countries, she says. Meanwhile, she will outline how life expectancy is now increasing rapidly in the more developed world, and catching up in the emerging economies, due to improvements in public health and medical advances. Demographers who have attempted to build assumptions about future scientific and medical advances into their forecasts say the number of centenarians may reach almost one million in the UK alone by the end of the century.
Professor Harper will say there has been a marked increase in the use of expensive new drug therapies which have helped us to live longer, and this trend is likely to increase. However, she warns that pharmaceutical advances should not replace public education programmes on healthy living: ‘I think we may be entering a world where preventable chronic disease will not be prevented by public health measures tackling lifestyles, but increasingly by drug therapies which will control and reduce symptoms of chronic disease.
‘We have to ask if we wish our future to be one where individuals at increasingly younger ages pop pills rather than eat healthily, stop smoking, reduce alcohol, and take up exercise. Do we want 10-year-olds popping statins?’
Drawing on their database of nearly two million occupational pension records, researchers at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing have found that healthy lifestyles have contributed as much to raising life expectancies as high incomes. Professor Harper says that 65 year-old-men retiring in ill health who had a low income and an unhealthy lifestyle could expect to live another 11 years, but 65-year-olds with healthy lifestyles added an extra four years to their lives, regardless of income.
On the issue of global population predictions, Professor Harper says fertility rates are dropping, a phenomenon identified by demographers as ‘the decline of the two-child family’. ‘If there is one thing which demographers failed to predict last century, it is how fast the total fertility rate would fall,’ she says. She says some are warning of ‘the low fertility trap’, whereby children in low-fertility countries adapt to the childless or one-child family model, thereby causing fertility rates to decline further. Anecdotal evidence on this is already emerging from China, whose one-child policy was in place for 30 years. ‘Limited evidence is emerging that despite the fact that they are allowed two children, most Chinese people are choosing to have just one child themselves because this is their own experience,’ says Professor Harper.
She will conclude: ‘The message is I think clear– the 21st Century is unlikely to be the last century of where youth exists, but it is also unlikely that we will see a return to population structures dominated by young people. In that sense it will be the last century to see the youthful demographies which the human race has experienced to date. We are seeing unprecedented change in our population structures.’
The Oxford London Lecture 2012 is being staged in association with The Guardian. It is an annual lecture series hosted by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The series aims to explore the latest Oxford research and consider how it can affect the world in the 21st century.
For more information, to arrange an interview or for a full transcript, please contact the University of Oxford Press Office at press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk, or tel+44 (0)1865 280534