The rapid increase in the proportion of senior citizens and the inversion of the age pyramid pose a number of medical, human, economic and societal challenges on a global scale. Despite the medical advances of recent decades, this unprecedented inversion of the age pyramid and the increasing burden of age-related pathologies and dependency are changing the concept of life expectancy towards that of longevity in health. Today’s medicine focuses on acute illnesses. This approach has made it possible to extend total longevity. However, a radical paradigm shift in medicine is needed to move towards prevention, in order to extend longevity in good health as well.
Geoscientific medicine must therefore target the biology of ageing and offer care, ideally preventive and in all cases comprehensive, centred on the individual and functional decline rather than on a disease.
