Prioritize Health

Insights from McKinsey. With a video.

 
During these trying times, it is especially important that we prioritize health issues in our collective and individual planning.

To begin, as we previously reported:

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    McKinsey Insights: Prioritize Health

    Today, we turn to McKinsey & Company for expert insights:

    The COVID-19 pandemic is an unwelcome reminder of just how much health matters for individuals, society, and the global economy. For the past century or more, health improvements from vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation, and nutrition, among others, have saved millions of lives and been a powerful catalyst for economic growth. Better health promotes economic growth by expanding the labor force and by boosting productivity while also delivering immense social benefits. However, in recent years, a focus on rising healthcare costs, especially in mature economies, has dominated the policy debate, whereas health as an investment for economic return has largely been absent from the discussion.

    In Prioritizing Health: A Prescription for Prosperity, we measure the potential to reduce the burden of disease globally through the application of proven interventions across the human lifespan over two decades. By intervention, we mean actions aimed at improving the health of an individual. These range from public sanitation programs to surgical procedures and adherence to medication and encompass interventions recommended by leading institutions like the World Health Organization or national medical associations. We also examine the potential to reduce the disease burden from innovations over the same period.

    Click the image to access the report. And then watch a video summary.

    Prioritize Health

     

Our Eyes as a Window to Our Age

New eye scanner provides helpful insights.

 
As Norbert Juma observes for Everyday Power,  “Eyes are the windows to the soul. They don’t lie. They show the truth, no matter what face you put on. Just like body language, our eyes say more than we ever could with words.” Today, we look at (pun intended 🙂 ) our eyes as a window to our age.
 

New Technology Shows Our Eyes as a Window to Our Age

Recently, researchers from Boston University College of Engineering and School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Washington, Seattle published an important article on this topic.

Click the image to access that article. Then read the highlights below. And watch the video clip.

Our Eyes as a Window to Our Age

According to the Boston College School of Medicine:

People often say that eyes are windows to the soul. It appears they may also be windows to human aging.

 All people age, but individuals age at different rates, some faster and others slower. Yet, we know of no universally accepted measure of biological aging. Numerous aging-related metrics have been proposed and tested. But no marker to date identifies  aging. And no noninvasive method accurately measures and tracks biological aging in individuals. In what we believe to be the first study of its kind, our researchers discovered that a specialized eye scanner accurately measures signals from proteins in lens of the eye. To detect and track biological aging in living humans.

The lens contains proteins that accumulate aging-related changes throughout life. These lens proteins provide a permanent record of each person’s life history of aging. Our eye scanner decodes this record of how a person is aging at the molecular level.