“Aging is the greatest risk factor for most diseases. Clearly, the ability of physicians to target aging will become increasingly important with an aging population.”

So said Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, MD, PhD, associate professor, University of Copenhagen, in the recent announcement of a new research collaboration in an essentially new field of medicine, Longevity Medicine.

“Longevity Medicine is, at its core, personalized preventative medicine and should be central in any modern medical education,” Dr. Scheibye-Knudsen continued. “We have emerging evidence that we can increase healthy aging and postpone age-related diseases. As physicians, it is our sworn duty to reduce suffering, and longevity medicine will become critical for keeping elderly individuals disease-free as long as possible.”

In many respects, the emergence of “longevity medicine” as a distinct field is the result of the development of AI tools that can track aging rates on multiple levels.

“In the past decade, many technologies including artificial intelligence and aging research converged allowing for a new field of science and medicine to emerge - longevity medicine,” explained Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Chief Longevity Officer at Deep Longevity, a company that has been developing explainable AI systems to track the rate of aging at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, system, physiological, and psychological levels. “Longevity medicine goes beyond the traditional preventative medicine which aims to prevent disease and instead aims to keep the patient in the age of optimal performance in the context of the entire lifespan.”

The group has published a book chapter titled AI in Longevity Medicine describing fundamental aspects of this emerging field, and, most recently, it has unveiled an educational program in Longevity Medicine that aims to provide the medical community with the latest information on the field. 

Indeed, AI technology was used to narrate the most recent Longevity Medicine 201 course, since it is easy to re-narrate and modify as new content becomes available. According to the group, the course incorporates the latest advances in AI in healthcare, and aging research and democratizes access to longevity healthcare.

As a recent overview in The Lancet explained, “The development of longevity-focused medical practices greatly depends on bridging the gap between health-care providers and interdisciplinary experts, such as academic biogerontologists, artificial intelligence experts, computer scientists, and informaticians. . . Patients have insufficient access to the health-care providers who have been adequately trained in longevity medicine and can manage a patient from a longevity medicine standpoint. Viable longevity education with practical translation will thus ultimately improve health-care systems worldwide and decrease disease occurrence by training health-care providers to tackle the most common and strongest contributor of disease—unhealthy aging.”

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