Fight Aging!

Below find linked a popular science article on some of the strands of research that aim at safely altering the operation of cellular metabolism to either (a) gently slow aging by reducing the pace at which underlying cell and tissue damage accumulates or (b) override some of the reactions to cellular damage that cause declines in tissue maintenance. Neither strategy aims at repair of that damage, unfortunately, and so is ultimately limited in the quality of results that can be achieved: no true rejuvenation, no indefinite healthspan, just a slowing of the inevitable. Nonetheless, overriding natural mechanisms to restore age-related declines in stem cell activity seems to be on track to produce benefits despite the continued presence of unrepaired cell and tissue damage. The evolved balance between cancer risk and stem cell decline appears to leave more room for action than anticipated.

The majority of older Americans live out their final years with at least one or two chronic ailments, such as arthritis, diabetes, heart disease or stroke. The longer their body clock ticks, the more disabling conditions they face. Doctors and drug companies traditionally treat each of these aging-related diseases as it arises. But a small group of scientists have begun championing a bold new approach. They think it is possible to stop or even rewind the body's internal chronometer so that all these diseases will arrive later or not at all. Studies of centenarians suggest the feat is achievable. Most of these individuals live that long because they have somehow avoided most of the diseases that burden other folks in their 70s and 80s. Nor does a centenarian's unusual longevity result in an end-of-life decline that lasts longer than anyone else's. In fact, research on hundreds of "super agers" suggests exactly the opposite. For them, illness typically starts later and arrives closer to the end.

Living longer may come with trade-offs. Making old cells young again will mean they will start dividing again. Controlled cell division equals youthfulness; uncontrolled cell division equals cancer. But at the moment, scientists are not sure if they can do one without the other. Figuring out the right timing for treatment is also complicated. If the goal is to prevent multiple diseases of aging, do you start your antiaging therapies when the first disease hits? The second? "Once you're broken, it's really hard to put you back together. It's going to be easier to keep people healthy." So it probably makes more sense to start treatment years earlier, during a healthy middle age. But the research needed to prove that supposition would take decades.

If various diseases can be pushed off, the next obvious question is by how long. It will take at least another 20 years of study to answer that question. Scientists have successfully extended the life span of worms eightfold and added a year of life to three-year-old lab mice. Would these advances translate into an 80-year-old person living five or six centuries or even an extra 30 years? Or would they get just one more year? Life extension in people is likely to be more modest than in yeast, worms, flies or mice. Previous research has suggested that lower-order creatures benefit the most from longevity efforts - with yeast, for instance, deriving a greater benefit in caloric-restriction experiments than mammals. The closer you get to humans, the smaller the effect on life span. And what magnitude of benefit would someone need to justify taking - and paying for - such a treatment? "Do you take a drug your whole life hoping to live 4 percent longer or 7 percent longer?"

I would hope that question never arises in any practical sense for the population at large, as efforts to alter metabolism to slow aging should be quickly overtaken and discarded in the near future by the far better results I'd expect to see achieved through damage repair therapies, such as those proposed in the SENS programs. SENS-like rejuvenation approaches based on repair of cell and tissue damage are slowly advancing to the point of generating meaningful results. That is already the case for senescent cell clearance, but there are numerous other lines of rejuvenation research still at far earlier stages. The sooner this transition happens, the better off we all are.

Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-study-3-promising-anti-aging-therapies/