Improving healthy life expectancy

Extending healthy life expectancy

From the pre-natal stage, each individual builds up a functional health reserve. While the parents’ behavior before and during pregnancy plays a major role in the child’s development, genetic predisposition, environment, education and other factors will influence the structuring stages of the child’s growth and advancement over the first 1,000 days.

📍 Early detection of signs of (pre)fragility

Functional reserve refers to an individual’s ability to withstand external stress: occasional (covid-19 etc.) or chronic illness, environmental condition (climatic, health or geopolitical crisis, etc.) and is built up throughout life.

Your daily habits have a short-, medium- and long-term impact on your ability to preserve and maintain a good level of functional reserve.

The level of functional reserve is determined using three statuses: robustness, pre-fragility and loss of autonomy leading to dependence.

Fragility is a concept first defined by Pr Linda Fried, using 5 criteria in 2001[1] :

• Weight loss
• Muscle weakness
• Fatigue
• Reducing walking speed
• Low physical activity

If you have one or two of these criteria, you are considered “pre-fragile”. If you have 3 or more, you are considered “fragile”.

💡 In 2013, the European SHARE study demonstrated that (pre)frailty is a reversible state[2]. Indeed, if this state is spotted in time, through targeted preventive actions (physical exercise, nutritional rehabilitation etc.) it is possible to return to the initial state of robustness, a state in which we find ourselves for the most part at age 25, at the peak of our functional reserve.

📍 Improving quality of life for caregivers

We often think that these notions of fragility are linked to the elderly, to people of the “third age”. However, a recent British study[3] showed that 38% of women aged 35 were in a state of pre-fragility.

The various conditions that characterize women’s lives (pregnancy, maternity, parenthood, etc.) are often responsible for a decline in functional reserve, and therefore require early detection and targeted action to ensure quality advancement in old age.

Pre-fragility doesn’t just affect women. The same publication also shows that pre-fragility does not spare young men. In the 35-45 age group, nearly 35% of men are said to be pre-fragile.

Also, as children grow up and leave home, parents often find themselves helping their own aging parents. This is known as continuity in the notion of parents and caregivers.

Lately, it has been shown that frailty is not only linked to physical condition, but is a multidimensional state, taking into account cognitive, social and sensory aspects.

🎯 Heloa, which helps with the early detection of various parenting-related disorders that appear in the first few years of a child’s life (baby blues, post-partum depression, parental burnout), also wants to offer parents the opportunity to self-assess their functional health using questionnaires based on scientifically validated benchmarks and tests, to support parents as they grow up, become teenagers and leave the family home.