What to Know About ‘Peakspan,’ the New Aging Metric Scientists Are Talking About

You’ve heard of lifespan. Probably healthspan, too. But have you heard of “peakspan”?

Peakspan is the length of time someone spends at or near peak health, as defined by the authors of a recent paper in the journal Aging & Disease.1 “We usually stay just a few years at our peak,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, an author of the paper and founder of the biotech company Insilico Medicine.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, argues Zhavoronkov. He believes humans can extend their peakspans to stay in top form longer.

What Is Peakspan?

Peakspan, as defined by the new paper, is about how long someone can stay near optimal health in a given physical domain. That means peakspan varies by organ system; your cardiovascular peakspan might be different from your cognitive peakspan, for example.

The idea is to “take your maximal performance that you’ve ever achieved in your lifetime, within a specific function, and look at how long you can stay within 10% of it,” Zhavoronkov said.

How is that different from healthspan? It depends on who you ask.

In the paper, Zhavoronkov and his co-authors define healthspan as years lived free of major disease, but there is no universal definition for the concept.

“The way I define healthspan is not just absence of disease,” said Mahtab Jafari, PharmD, director of the University of California Irvine Center for Healthspan Sciences. “It’s about maintaining what you have.”

“Healthspan could be defined as the period of time that you remain healthy, and being healthy is more than just free of disease,” agreed Jay Luthar, MD, a Boston-based integrative primary care physician. “How many more subdomains of ‘spans’ do we really need?”

How Long Is Your Peakspan?

In most parts of the body, physical function tends to peak relatively early—generally in one’s 20s or 30s, according to Zhavoronkov’s paper. As cellular and molecular damage accumulates with time, systems often start to decline, and the risk for disease goes up.

That’s a general trend. But individuals can peak at very different times, Luthar said.

“Imagine somebody who’s sedentary in their 20s and 30s and has very poor measures of physical fitness,” he said. “They don’t actually meet their theoretical peak [in those decades]—but that doesn’t mean that, in their 50s or 60s, they couldn’t say, ‘I’m going to change my entire lifestyle and start running marathons.’”

A 2026 study in the journal Geriatrics reinforced that some people get better with age. The study assessed the cognitive and physical health of thousands of older adults for up to 12 years. Almost half of the group improved either cognitively or physically during the study period.

“It’s never too early to start and it’s never too late to start focusing on healthspan,” Jafari told Health.

Can You Extend Your Peakspan?

Improvement may be possible at any age. But is it realistic—or helpful—to aim for peak health forever?

Not necessarily, Luthar said. It’s possible to get so obsessed with healthy aging that you become anxious in the present. Plus, some of the most meaningful things in life — happiness, wisdom, connection, fulfillment—aren’t neatly captured by concepts like peakspan, he said.

Then there’s the fact that aging is inevitable. As of now, there is no miracle drug proven to extend lifespan, healthspan, or peakspan.

But there are relatively small fixes that can make a big difference, Zhavoronkov said. “The simplest intervention that allows you to regain lost function, when it comes to eyesight, would be glasses,” he pointed out. You could think of hip replacements, dentures, and hearing aids similarly. The point is, extending peakspan isn’t necessarily about high-tech regenerative medicine or brand-new drugs, he said.

At least as the science stands now, in fact, the best tools available are lifestyle adjustments, Jafari said. Basics like staying active, following a balanced diet, and spending time with your loved ones have been shown to boost longevity.

Your mindset matters, too. The recent Geriatrics study found that the people whose cognitive or physical health improved with age tended to be those who had positive outlooks on aging. On the flip side, another recent study found that anxiety about aging may actually speed up the aging process.

The goal, then, may not be to stop aging altogether, but to greet it with optimism and a sense of agency. “My advice to everyone who wants to live significantly longer,” Zhavoronkov said, is to “change your mindset to a longevity mindset.”