LOS ANGELES -- Here's the good news: Many children born in the United States of 2020 may live 110 years.
Now here's the bad news: Children from inner cities may live less than half that long.
Disparities in health care delivery and education between the rich and the poor are already translating into vastly different life expectancies in different regions of the United States, leading medical thinkers warned at the annual Milken Institute conference.
And that "biological divide" will become far wider over the next two decades unless the nation commits to providing health care equally to all its citizens.
"Right now there are counties in the U.S. where the average life expectancy is 85, and others where it is in the 40s, as bad as anywhere in the developing world," said Richard Klausner, president of the Case Institute of Health, Science and Education, and former director of the National Cancer Institute. "We need to have a system where no one is without health care."
Indeed, the rise of a few virulent infectious diseases like AIDS and decreased living standards have actually led to decreasing life expectancies in some parts of the United States and the developing world, Klausner said.
By contrast, the life expectancy of middle-class Americans has nearly doubled to 79 years over the last century due to the effectiveness of antibiotics, immunizations and new cardiovascular treatments that vastly improve the chances of surviving serious heart conditions. "And many of the elderly are living disease-free, healthy lives well into their 60s," Klausner said.
Advances in cardiovascular treatment and preventative medicine mean that today, for the vast majority of people, "there simply shouldn't be any heart disease," said S. Ward Casscells, chief of cardiology for University of Texas-Houston and the co-founder of three biotech companies.
In the next few decades, preventive medicine and new treatments for cancer will once again dramatically increase the life expectancies of individuals with access to health care, Casscells said.
Casscells and colleagues at the University of Texas originally hypothesized that kids born in 2020 might live to 120, "but we took off 10 years because it's almost impossible to get college-age people to stop smoking."
New cancer treatments won't come a moment too soon for Casscells, who is himself fighting an aggressive prostate cancer.
Former FDA commissioner David Kessler, now dean of Yale Medical School, predicted that early warning tests for cancer and new medicines could make the vast majority of cancers chronic rather than fatal diseases over the next two decades.
Some of those new medicines will be the fruits of his tenure as FDA commissioner, during which he cut average drug approval times in half.
Kessler acknowledged the "paradox" in a system that will allow those with better access to health care to benefit disproportionately from those advances.
But advances in understanding how to prevent heart attacks, lung cancer, colon cancer and other diseases of diet and environment will impact the life expectancy of rich and poor alike over the next 20 years, he added.
"Regardless of their financial resources, people can still change their lifestyles," he said.
