Living long and living well: Is it possible to do both?

Exactly when does old age begin? Which health markers best predict who will live a long and healthy life versus a life spent in poor health? Developing metrics to help answer these questions and to understand the tradeoffs between lifespan and health span is the subject of a recent paper by MDI Biological Laboratory scientists in Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences , a publication of the Gerontological Society of America. The authors studied various parameters of health in short-lived strains of the roundworm, C. elegans , with the goal of developing an empirical definition of the onset of old age, and of teasing out which health markers are most predictive of a long and healthy life.