The desire to live a healthy long life has been a constant drive for search of solutions to achieve human longevity. With the advancement in medical science, successful treatment and management of a large number of diseases has become possible. With the capacities of the modern medicine human longevity has also evidently increased. How long can a human live a healthy life? How far can we stretch it? These are the prominent questions for medical research in longevity.
Aging biology research has gained prominence in recent times. Moqri et al. (2023) defines aging as “The process of accumulation of consequences of life, such as molecular and cellular damage, that leads to functional decline, chronic diseases, and ultimately mortality” and healthspan as “The period of life prior to onset of chronic disease and disabilities of aging, i.e., in good health”. To achieve longer healthspan and thereby longevity it is important to identify the factors that positively or negatively affect healthy longevity. Study of these factors will be a long term scientific endeavor spanning multiple decades which will involve measurements and recording of all the life processes and health interventions that the human research volunteers have undergone through their lifespan. These records will not only be helpful for the research but also for implementation of the research outcomes in normal practice. If an individual is interested in achieving healthy longevity and wishes to implement research findings to achieve these goals, the individual must have all the record of life processes and medical interventions to predict own longevity and adopt corrective measures. This highlights the importance of health informatics which makes it possible to record and analyze health data that accumulates during a person’s lifetime.
The American Medical Informatics Association defines health informatics as “The science of how to use data, information, and knowledge to improve human health and the delivery of health care services.” (Wheeler, 2022). Health informatics will be essential for identification and evaluation of longevity interventions in humans. Identification of valid ‘Biomarkers of aging’ will require analysis of huge number of individual’s lifetime of health data. Health informatics records will be useful for the development and validation of clinical applications.
The present challenges in health informatics as in any area of data science includes consensus and standardization of data formats and biomarkers being recorded, precise recording of medical and health data, proper frequency of data recording and reliability of the data. Properly maintained electronic health records (EHR) and personal health records (PHR) will play an essential role in aging and longevity research.
For larger utility of scientific community large number of these EHRs should be available in the form of biomedical databases. These databases may serve as major resources for knowledge discovery and predictive analytics. For effective use of big medical and life history data in biomedical research these databases need to adhere to FAIR principles which necessitates Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of the data. To enhance reliability and trustworthiness of shared research data, the data should be compliant to TRUST principles which include Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology.
In conclusion, good data is the backbone of good research. Longevity prediction and therapeutic interventions will need huge amount of genetic data and medical records of large number of individuals. FAIR and TRUSTful data will be required for research and diagnostics, and personalized longevity applications. Properly maintained patient medical history and reliable personal life records will be essential for application of aging biomarker based interventions and to achieve this, health informatics will serve as an essential tool in longevity research.
References:
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