Recategorizing Aging

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

The concept of "normal aging" or "normal wear and tear" doesn't hold up well to the advance of biotechnology. Most age-related conditions were once thought to be "normal aging" and thus not worth devoting resources to - and I'd wager that almost all of what is left of "normal aging" is a mass of unidentified conditions. Medical News Today has an example of recategorization at work: "Heart valve disease is caused not by a 'wear and tear' phenomenon, but by an inflammatory process likely triggered by high cholesterol that stimulates certain cells to reprogram into bone cells in the aortic valve and cartilage cells in the mitral valve ... Common wisdom in the medical community has always been that thickening of the mitral valves was part of the aging process as deposits of calcium, a mineral found in the blood, built up on the valves. Therefore, research has never focused on preventing the problem."

Link: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=41507