Fight Aging!

This scientific editorial summarizes and provides links to many of the papers published of late on the topic of whether or not aging should be classified as a disease. This is primarily a question of regulation and advocacy, and how those issues interact with the pace of progress and the ability to bring more money to bear on research into treating aging as a medical condition. That present regulatory systems don't recognize aging as a medical condition has greatly impacted the ability to raise funds at all levels of development. Given the present state of the science, with the first actual, real rejuvenation treatments already under clinical development in startups, there is much more willingness in the scientific community to call for funding and work towards changing the present system.

The quest to increase healthy lifespan is becoming a pressing economic priority required to preserve the current standards of living. Rapidly increasing dependency ratios and unfunded social security and healthcare liabilities are an enormous and growing burden on the economies of developed countries. But the situation, if handled properly, is not hopeless; with advances in anti-aging treatments and preventative care, the negative economic impact of aging could be at very least reduced, while increases in productive longevity in developed countries could actually stimulate significant economic growth. One of the impediments to industry transformation is the way aging is treated. While no doubt exists that aging is a complex multifactorial process leading to a progressive decline in function with no single cause or treatment, the issue of whether aging can be classified as a disease is widely debated by gerontologists, medical doctors, demographers, philosophers, policy makers, and the general public. This disagreement has until now hindered classification of aging as a disease and, consequently, the fitting of potential treatment options into established research, regulatory, insurance, and marketing frameworks.

Some prominent biogerontologists have provided comprehensive weighted responses explaining the dangers of separation of aging from disease and benefits of proactive preventative approaches that are likely to result from recognizing the pathological nature of aging. In spite of the many breakthroughs providing proof of concept for successful interventions in aging in model organisms, human progress has been surprisingly slow. One major cause of inaction is a widely held, but flawed, conceptual framework concerning the relationship between aging and disease that categorizes the former as "natural" and the latter as "abnormal". One comprehensive review of the many arguments for and against classifying aging as a disease with a definite and eloquent recommendation that calls for a complete quote: "We must draw aside the rosy veil of tradition and face aging for what it is, and in all its horror: the greatest disease of them all."

Bulterijs et al. explained the many benefits of classifying aging a disease, while Stambler provided a historical perspective arguing that acknowledging the possibility of successful intervention into the aging process, in other words treating aging as a curable disease, has been a long and highly respected tradition of biomedical thought. Dubnikov and Cohen provided an overview of multiple theories of aging and recommended further research to understand the relationship between aging and disease. Advocates for longevity research provided new survey data indicating that the majority (74.4%) of Americans are interested to live to 120 or longer if health was guaranteed, but only 57.4% wished to live that long if it wasn't, contradicting previous surveys that used different approaches to surveying the general population and generally indicated negative attitudes toward increased longevity and longevity-boosting interventions.

The main international agency responsible for disease classification is the World Health Organization (WHO), which maintains and publishes the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) since 1948. The 10th revision of the ICD, referred as ICD-10, was first published in 1992, and the 11th revision (ICD-11) is expected to be released in 2018. WHO classifies aging as a disease in the ICD-10 with the R54 code. However, this code is generally regarded by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) statisticians as a "garbage code" and cannot be considered to be actionable. Actionable classification of aging as a disease may lead to more efficient allocation of resources by enabling funding bodies and other stakeholders to use quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and healthy-years equivalent (HYE) as metrics when evaluating both research and clinical programs. In order to classify aging with an actionable code or set of codes linked to specific age-related diseases, we propose an international task force to be organized to develop and communicate proposals to the WHO at the national and international levels.

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4754422/