Alisha Wainwright

I wonder when you hear that clip, what you think of in terms of how we think about aging.

Okay, so I'd like to dig into this equity question here.

To what extent is aging determined by your social and behavioral factors?

And is there an equity issue with aging?

Shamita described the print showing the couple's health declining in old age.

Is this the kind of assumption that you're trying to challenge in the field?

Is that because they live longer?

In a biological context, what does aging really mean?

And what is meant by the term age-related disease and how much do we know about the mechanisms that drive them?

One recent investigation into the mechanisms of aging looked closely at our organs and found some interesting links to age-related disease.

To hear more about this, we spoke to Dr. Mika Kivimaki.

Mika is professor of epidemiology at University College London, and he also leads the Whitehall II study.

Whitehall 2 is a longitudinal, large cohort study that has collected data from its participants for more than 40 years now, looking at how socioeconomic factors affect health in the long term.

Using this data and with some advances in blood testing technology, Mika and his team developed a way to determine differences between biological age and chronological age in individual organs and explored the implications.

What are the implications of this kind of organ aging discovery for, for example, like a place like London where you have life expectancy differences of 10 years?

Who I've been a...

My body has been a culprit of that.

And what are some of the challenges of researching aging and how do long-term cohort studies like Whitehall to help with this?

And what are the next steps for this kind of research in addition to diversifying our clinical trials?

So thinking of the latest research in the field that we've been discussing, what kinds of interventions could lead to healthier aging?