Over the past three years, the renowned Mayo Clinic has been building “one of the largest aging centers in the nation,” according to the Minneapolis StarTribune, with “48 geriatricians, 10 geriatric psychiatrists and research supported by 90 federal or private foundation grants.” And they’ve put all that money to good use, “producing more than 100 research papers annually.”

The team at the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging is focused on what you’re focused on: how to live a vital, independent life, as opposed to just how long you’re able to grind out contractions from that tired, gray mass of sclerotic tissue you call your heart. The span of a healthy life versus the span of life—or, in Mayo’s terminology, healthspan vs. lifespan.

The center can point to one marquee study result so far, the discovery that the biological deadwood that builds up in your body with age—“senescent” cells that cause low-grade inflammation—can be cleared away with drugs and doing so makes mice (anyway) less prone to the insults of time. And anyone over 50 will be interested to learn that the mice showed benefits even if they were started on the drug when they were already old.

The docs at Mayo are also trying to understand the mechanisms behind the bedrock intuition about aging: that you have to use it or lose it. While there’s not conclusive evidence that exercise will lengthen your life, studies show that it will improve your healthspan. (For example, Mayo researchers in Florida have found that exercise “increases the size and function of the hippocampus, the region of the brain that regulates memory and is first to decline with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”)

But no one knows why. Cracking that code could lead to better workouts and maybe nutrients or drugs that could maximize the benefits of your time in the pool or on the treadmill. This could also lead to what one Mayo researcher calls “prehabilitation”—using drugs to prepare patients for orthopedic surgeries. We don’t claim to understand this notion, but we like the word so much we plan to overuse it for the next month.

Photo: “Dancing by the Old Mint at French Quarter Fest” (2009) by Vincent & Bella Productions, via Wikimedia Commons