Fight Aging!

The financial costs of degenerative aging are vast. Each year hundreds and possibly thousands of times what it would cost to fully develop a demonstration of first generation SENS rejuvenation biotechnologies is spent or lost due to aging and age-related disease. This is depressing but fairly standard for any field of research and development: the funds allocated towards finding ways to improve the situation are usually minuscule in comparison to the funds that go towards running, coping with, or propping up the status quo. It's amazing that anything ever improves when you look at that split of investment.

You can look back into the Fight Aging! archives to find various estimates from the research community on the ongoing cost of specific diseases. The costs incurred by stroke patients in the US alone are thought to be in the vicinity of $50 billion each year, for example. Various forms of skeletal and muscular degeneration may add another $20 billion, and some researchers suggests that dementia costs more than $150 billion each year. Grand totals in the US from mainstream data providers approach $300 billion in direct costs, with much more in lost productivity every year.

Here researchers run worldwide numbers on heart failure, another of the major causes of age-related death. The total given in the abstract is surprisingly low, considering per-condition cost estimates I've seen elsewhere, such as those mentioned above:

The annual global economic burden of heart failure

We estimated the overall cost of heart failure in 2012, in both direct and indirect terms, across the globe. Existing country-specific heart failure costs analyses were expressed as a proportion of gross domestic product and total healthcare spend. Using World Bank data, these proportional values were used to interpolate the economic cost of HF for countries of the world where no published data exists. Countries were categorized according to their level of economic development to investigate global patterns of spending.

197 countries were included in the analysis, covering 98.7% of the world's population. The overall economic cost of HF in 2012 was estimated at $108 billion per annum. Direct costs accounted for ~60% ($65 billion) and indirect costs accounted for ~40% ($43 billion) of the overall spend. Heart failure spending varied widely between high-income and middle and low-income countries. High-income countries spend a greater proportion on direct costs: a pattern reversed for middle and low-income countries.

The indirect costs that include lost productivity are more usually several times the size of the direct costs, but that all depends on methodology and definitions. The total for direct costs globally is a small multiple of US-only direct costs in other conditions, so perhaps these scientists are defining heart failure very narrowly, excluding the costs of the chronic conditions and events such as heart attacks that lead to heart failure.

Either way, these are the costs that might be avoided through the development of rejuvenation therapies. Some people are persuaded by finances rather than human costs of suffering and death: the numbers have long been very persuasive. The cost of even fully funded development is small compared to the costs of aging as they stand today.