We are increasingly living longer and healthier. The conquest of longevity is a project that has not slowed down, and is now more than ever obsessed by scientists and technology companies. Where do bodies and health go? Has the concept of disease changed? Guadalupe Sabio Pozo, researcher at the National Center for Cancer Research (CNIO), and Guillermo Antinolo, MD, gynecologist, pioneer in fetal medicine and gene therapies in Spain, and author of The female genome revolutionduring the Trends 2025 event.
Illness, Antinolo commented, “is an old concept, and what we want to talk about today is maintaining health and anticipating problems.” The gynecologist specializes in women’s health and advocates that their study, without gender bias, is the key to the future: “Until now it has been a fragmented study (menopause, motherhood…) but it is a continuous line. Our outstanding task is to ensure that women in medicine are not studied from a masculine-centric point of view. Women are living longer, but their quality of life deteriorates more after the age of 50, which is not a political issue, but a necessary issue. Or they are treated with a specific model otherwise we lose out in health and research.
Pozo agrees, adding that understanding what prevention is and how the body works opens up “a lot of scope, because everything that hasn’t been studied in women represents new ways of treatment and prevention.” He also pointed to the need for an in-depth understanding of one of today’s major health challenges: obesity. The researcher explained: “We must understand how it works to know when it is working poorly and it is not always related to weight. Fat is another endocrine organ. It secretes substances that we can detect in the blood and we can identify them to say: This person’s fat has a disease compared to another person’s fat.”
he Trends 2025 event It is a meeting organized by EL PAÍS and sponsored by Abertis, Enagás, EY, Novartis, OEI (Organization of Ibero-American States), Redeia and Santander.